When my daughter cuts my hair

On the family as a philosophical education

Hello, VDL readers! We’re nearly at the end of year, and I have just a couple more pieces to send out. Today, we have a little essay on parenthood and home life; next week, I’ll close out the year with my rip-roaring Best of 2024 Super Awesome Post. After that, I’ll take the rest of the year off.

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We’re having our bathroom remodeled. The job was supposed to take three, maybe four weeks. That was three months ago. Which, that sounds about right. Time for home renovations and, like, life pass at different speeds, as on the giant wave planet in Interstellar. Come and help me, TARS.

It’s all good, though–we knew these things always take longer than expected. We’re practicing patience. We’re learning gratitude. There are certain annoyances, though. Chief among them, the fact that we don’t have a working shower in the house. Sometimes I take the kids to my sister-in-law’s to scrub themselves clean, but that’s one more drive to make during the week.

The real rub, though, is that lacking a working shower has meant that I’ve been unable to cut my hair. “Cut” is perhaps too generous. I buzz it, with a buzzer, as I’m a heavily balding male in his early 40s, and buzzing my scalp clean is simply the best move available to me, style-wise. I buzz it myself, before a mirror, using my camera phone to scope out the back, and then hop in the shower afterward, to rinse my freshly-shorn scalp clean.

Without a shower, though, I haven’t been able to buzz my hair. It grew to unusual lengths around the sides of my head, sparsely on top, like a Chia pet whose seeds were poorly applied. We’re talking mad scientist here. No one was happy.

But! Our contractor got the shower up and working! Progress is still being made on the rest of the bathroom, but that showerhead floweth like an oasis in the desert! This also means that I can finally cut my hair and once again look like a moderately put-together dad in the school-pickup line.

I prepared my usual materials: the buzzer, a step stool, and set myself before the full-length mirror in our entryway, affixed to the closet door. I stripped to my underwear, to keep from getting hair on any of my clothes. Look, you have a family, you live in your house, you’re going to wind up in your skivvies at some point. Just as I was starting, though, my oldest daughter came downstairs. Intrigued by the sight, long-missed, of her father buzzing his hair.

I asked if she wanted to help. Not like she could mess it up, anyway. All that hair’s got to come off one way or another. She accepted, excited at the prospect of wielding the buzzer. She raised it to my head. Sheared off tuft after tuft. Her hand on my head, my hair falling to the floor.

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What’s it like to have children? To have a family? To exist in the same house with other members of your family, members whose very existence is owed to you?

The best description I can come up with is to make up a word that sounds like it was awkwardly translated from German. The feeling of having a family, of existing in the same space as one’s spouse and one’s children, is a feeling of overlappingness.

My wife, our children, myself–we overlap each other in the house. One laid atop the other while still remaining visible, like we are all panes of stained glass. We do separate for significant stretches of the day. Our kids go to school, and I go to work at the grocery store, leaving my wife at the house to Work From Home. Occasionally, she goes to meetings on-campus, and the only creatures left in the house are our pets–two cats, two rabbits. Yet we always return to this state of overlappingness, our bodies and ourselves occupying the same space, sometimes feeling that we’re breaking some law of physics. How can one home contain so much self? How do we not crowd each out?

I admit, it gets to be overwhelming sometimes. My days off, I usually spend the whole day out of the house, until it’s time to pick up my kids from school. I run errands, I hang out in coffeeshops, I donate plasma. I extricate myself from the overlappingness of family life before returning to it, as always.

Yet I find, whenever I think about this state, that it strikes me as deeply–what, literary? Is that the term? No, I see what I mean. Overlappingness strikes me as deeply philosophical. Physical proximity, of family members, produces this strange effect whereby regular human creatures become philosophical concepts. My daughter is not simply a nine-year-old girl. She is Human Need Personified, impinging upon my own awareness, bending my sense of obligation down toward her, like a growing tree pulled down nearly to the ground, its pulp stretching.

Raise a child, watch it grow in awareness, and you will come to see how philosophy came about in the first place. Attempts to make sense of a world you were brought into, to make out the faces of the lumbering concepts that surrounded you. Attempting, and never finishing.