The Story of My First Grade Bangs

Every month or so, my much-loved bangs start to look like this and it turns me into a crazy person.

I usually head into the salon to get them trimmed by professionals, but this time, I couldn’t get an appointment and things were getting bad, so I decided (after MUCH debate) to cut them myself at home. They turned out just fine, as you can see…

But there was a lot of unhappiness the night I trimmed them. Thank goodness Dan was around to fix my mistakes calmly. And I’m not sure I wouldn’t attempt it again, despite my freak out. But the reason for this post is that this is actually not the first time I have cut my own bangs. See, back in the early 80s, I had the same bangs that I have now.

And as it goes, it was time to grow them out. Everything was going fine; my mom employed a lot of those awesome 80s plastic barrettes and such. Fast forward to one fateful day when I was in first grade. I had seen Mary Poppins and became convinced that the girl in Mary Poppins didn’t need an elastic underneath her hair ribbon, and so obviously I could wear a ribbon in my (fine, slippery, straight) hair without a rubber band to hold it in place to. My mom humored me, as moms do, and off I went to school. Except as the day went on, bits of hair freed themselves from the ribbon and fell into my eyes. Being the logical and resourceful six-year-old that I was, I used the scissors in my desk to cut the hair hanging in my eyes.

Obviously.

So imagine my mom’s surprise when I came home from school – with a half inch of bangs in the center of my forehead, bangs that I most certainly did not have when I left that morning. I still can’t imagine how my mom reacted. But the kicker of the story is that I REFUSED to grow that half-inch of bangs in or let my mom cut more for THREE YEARS. So I had a half inch of bangs in the middle of my forehead from first through fourth grades. I still remember being REALLY MAD at my mom for making me hairspray them back for my third grade class picture.