Today a hair stylist ripped out my heart, stabbed it repeatedly with scissors, and then threw it into the cold icy street where it was crushed by oncoming traffic

Well, not really. This is what actually happened:

Because my daughter has hair like this…

(It’s hard to see here, but the multi-layered look she is sporting is more 1981 Mullet than 1997 Jennifer Aniston.)

…I had to go and do this…

…and now she looks like this…

The stylist in the picture is Tina. Tina used to own the salon where the monumental haircut event took place and now that she is “retired” she works one day a week. During my last year-and-a-half of college I worked as the assistant manager at the salon for Tina and her husband Marvin, and they were very good to me. It was Tina who gave me my first color and convinced me to wear my hair short, so having Tina at the scissors for the first haircut was symbolic, a circle-of-life moment, and I’m glad she was willing to do it.

I was okay until she started on the bangs. I had decided to leave the bangs alone. But the hair that would be bangs (honestly, can you call nose-length hair “bangs”?) was always in her face, and she was always trying to push the hair out of her eyes. It needed to happen, but it was hard for me, especially since I had to physically hold her head. She didn’t mind, though, because she was sucking on baby crack a cherry Dum-dum. Thanks, Tina.

To see more before, during, and after, go here.