A couple weeks ago a Mohawk craze hit my home. First, one morning, my four year old son decided he wanted to go to school with a mohawk. So his obliging mother set him up with a mohawk. And that combined with his faux leather jacket ended up a big hit with the preschool set down in Greenwich Village.
In fact it was such a big hit that the frenzy only grew from there. Now it wasn’t enough to have his hair gelled up in a crest like one of the whateverasauruses in his dinosaur books. He actually wanted his hair cut into a mohawk. But bear in mind his 2 1/2 year old brother has to do everything he does. It’s either genetic or some sort of secret contract they have. Maybe the little guy just lost a bet.
So the next day I’m getting texted pictures on my phone of both sons at the barber shop getting mohawks. Not mohawks precisely like I knew them in high school but what I guess is called a faux-hawk, basically cutting your hair on the sides and leaving a lot of extra surplus hair piled up on top for easy mohawk preparation. So now both my kids who barely make up six years between them are running around the house with tightly shellacked mohawks hard enough to give you a respectable laceration if they bumped up against you at a decent velocity. And then I think every other day the older one was gelled up in the morning for another repeat performance at preschool.
Like most fads, this one seemed to fade. And before long I just had two sons with a lot more hair stacked on the top of their heads than they had on the sides. Until tonight.
A bit past midnight, the younger one starts crying out saying something about as comprehensible as can be with a pacifier in his mouth, which ain’t very comprehensible. So I head over to see what’s up and what I can do. I’m there. He’s crying. I can’t understand what he’s saying. The normal offers aren’t working. He’s wailing louder and he’s definitely going to wake up his brother. I start getting tense. I don’t know what to do so I do the one sure fire thing: I call my wife and say I need help.
So this investigation continues. And we realize he’s still in a dream and he’s bellowing in this woozy dazed cry: “I don’t want to have a mohawk.”
“I don’t wwwaaaaannna have a moe-hwk…”
My wife reassures him: You don’t have to have a mohawk.
Still checking in from dreamville: “Oooooooookkkkkayyyyyy….” And he drifts back to sleep.
