It is 19:00 hours on a Friday, and the family barber is reporting for duty.
I’m the family barber.
It started five years ago, during the pandemic lockdown. Since Great Clips was closed for a while—and then reopened with a masking mandate—my husband, who was not interested in growing out his hair then or ever, asked me to trim it. What to do?
There were, to be sure, creative DIY solutions available. A former colleague recommended ordering a Flowbee attachment for our vacuum, which my husband would have been able to wield himself. But I found it difficult to imagine anyone actually giving himself a trim with a vacuuming attachment, even as the internet assured me it was perfectly safe and effective. And so, I got haircutting scissors instead, although we also have electric clippers on standby for some parts of the process. Now, five years later, I’ve got close to one hundred family haircuts under my belt. I haven’t given anyone a bald spot in a while. I’ve got layering sort of down. I’ve only made one customer cry in the past few months. I’d say I have achieved bona fide proficiency as a haircutter.
Cutting hair feels remarkably intimate and caring. Working with scissors requires a particularly tender touch, as you gently comb hair with water, then use your hands to hold it just so between the index and the third through the fifth fingers (to use the piano player’s numbering), then gently and precisely applying the scissors with the other hand to each segment that has been isolated. On and on you go, piece by piece, holding them each in its turn in such a way as to achieve layering instead of unevenness and visible edge spots. As hair falls down from each cut that is made, covering the floor, tangible results of this labor emerge, reminding us that hair, while living, is also dead. Cut hair cannot bleed or hurt, but the stakes feel no less high in the moment. Not all mistakes are easily fixable right away, after all. Some errors might require the victim customer to live with a poor haircut for a few weeks, until hair grows out sufficiently to erase or mitigate the barber’s sins.
While the aesthetic stakes are higher, cutting hair is a service act that parallels washing feet. The person receiving care must remain still—seated, hopefully relaxed. Meanwhile, the person providing this act of care cannot multitask while performing it; instead, all else disappears, and only the person for whom one is caring in this physical way remains the focus for several minutes.
It is remarkable how works of care can force us into tunnel vision in a way that we otherwise rarely achieve in this busy and over-mechanized world. In the case of cutting hair, the level of concentration feels even more acute than washing feet, especially when trimming the hair of a squirmy little boy. Trimming hair around the ears is always particularly difficult, and it is probably a miracle that I haven’t nicked any ears yet. Indeed, an acquaintance’s son, the same age as my middle child, once got his ear nicked at a haircutting establishment half-way through a haircut. It turns out ears bleed quite intensely, in case you’re wondering. The child in question refused to have his hair cut for months afterwards, afraid of a possible repeat.
Could be worse. In a particularly famous case in the Code of Justinian, a compilation of Roman law from the sixth century AD, a barber is at work next to a ball field. As the barber is shaving a customer with a razor, a stray ball hits his elbow, and the jostle causes the barber to cut his customer’s throat. In a further plot twist, the unfortunate customer happens to be enslaved. The question in the code involves complex economic questions more than anything else, poignantly reminding us that in the ancient world, the system of slavery was taken for granted, even as the church powerfully spoke for the vulnerable, seeing the face of Christ in every person. Justinian’s Code is not a law of love, nor does it claim to be one. It is a law of a practical empire, ruled by an immensely practical emperor, one bent on instilling the rule of law over chaos.
But into laws of love, chaos at times enters in, unbidden yet essential. And so, for me, cutting hair is an act of love—for this squirmy boy who makes this activity so incredibly stressful for me at times with his sudden moves; for my older son, now out of the house and whose extraordinarily thick wiry hair I no longer cut, but whose uneven hairline I remember, as it made the task infinitely trickier for the haircutter; for my husband, whose hair has somehow gotten curlier over the years, especially in the back, now making it harder to cut evenly. And then there is the little girl, who has never had an official full haircut, but who occasionally dips her hair in sauce or other substances, necessitating partial trims of affected locks. In her case especially, chaos and love are natural neighbors, reminding us that to love others well requires dwelling with the unpredictable and the messy.
But it is always worth it. Each time I get the haircutting scissors out, I learn something new about the family member whose hair I am trimming. Yes, I have carried you within my womb for nine months (I think sometimes in wonder when trimming my children’s hair), and yet I still have so much to learn about who you are, who God made you to be. Your hair keeps changing as you grow, and it has stories to tell, if only I listen.
Indeed, this much is true outside the family home as well. Barbers and haircutters know things. Such is the realization that inevitably dawns on the reader of Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow. The novel’s protagonist, a barber, lives his life on the fringes of his community, it seems—in Port William but not fully of it—yet he knows many of his town’s secrets. Port William’s stories of joy and sorrow are written in haircuts and shaves, in conversations in the barber’s shop and around it—in the streets, in the woods still there and in those now tragically gone by the novel’s end, in the fields and the farms, in silent glances exchanged, in words said and those never even whispered aloud, and in prayers kept hidden forever.
You simply cannot keep secrets from the one who cuts your hair for years upon years, so don’t even try. Instead, the barber is the de facto confessor, the one to whom you bare your soul whether in speech or in silence, even as you get your haircut. Cheaper than therapy—even with the tip, even in this economy. This is true and magnified manyfold with the family barber.
“The very hairs of your head are all numbered,” Jesus assured his disciples. “Not a hair of your head will perish,” he said on another occasion. God cares about every aspect of our being, even about our hair—each and every one of these countless hairs, in fact. Thus caring for the hair of our loved ones is yet another beautiful reflection of God’s care for us. Jesus may not have cut his disciples’ hair—although he did wash their feet—but the point still applies. And Jesus himself was the object of Mary’s tender care for him, when she anointed his feet and dried them with her hair. To love and to be loved go together, and the story of both is somehow written even in our hair—its growth, its cuts, the perfumes it absorbs through daily living.
And so, I conclude the little boy’s latest haircut, brushing him off gently as I plant a kiss on the top of his silky head, still smelling sweet from last night’s shampoo, yet the sweetness mingling with the scent of sweat from running outside all of this spring afternoon. How much longer will he let me do this? When will he decide that it is too strange to have mom cut his hair? I don’t know. But for this season, I am grateful for this gift.
Image Credit: Walter Praefke, “Scissors” (1939) via National Gallery of Art
