I always love driving in to the city to pick up my daughter at her apartment. I used to fear driving there, but honestly? Nothing scares me anymore. I have developed this kind of he-who-hesitates-is-lost mentality, and in the city I have learned to drive at least aggressively enough.
But my favorite part of it is having my daughter in the car with me. We have similar taste in music and senses of humor- heaven help her- and we usually spend a good part of the ride home wailing with laughter.
Yesterday I picked her up. She got into the car. I noticed that her hair was pulled back and she was wearing her hoodie pulled up. We got her settled with her dirty laundry, and started back for home. A few minutes into the ride, she said, “Do you remember when I was 3 years old and cut my own bangs?” I knew what was coming so I started laughing.
She said, “I was all alone last night and bored, so I decided to cut my hair. It didn’t look that great so I cut a little more, and that didn’t work so I decided to layer it to frame my face.” By this time we were both laughing so hard we had were crying, and if I had not been a danger on the road prior to this, I now crossed that delicate line. She pulled off the hoodie and I could see chopped up bits of hair, staggered like a Jack-O-Lantern’s teeth, and her bangs in the front were so short that her cowlick made them stand up center-left.
When I could finally catch my breath I said, “Becca, what were you thinking of?” She told me that once she started she just had to keep going, and asked me in a worried voice, “Do you think I have OCD?” “No,” I replied, “I think you are human.”
Everyone has done something like that. You just know you should stop, but you keep going anyway. There are lots of reasons for this: everyone else is doing it; you’ve messed something up and you’re pretty sure that you can fix it if you just keep at it; maybe you think that if you try something just a little differently your success at it will improve.
And you know what? You probably succeed once in a great while, and that’s just enough to keep you with the scissors to your hair. This random intermittent reinforcement- the occasional success- can keep you trying even though, like in my daughter’s case, some situations can’t be helped by your behavior.
What a human thing! Happens in personal life, happens professionally. We’re all guilty of doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, or using a technique that worked years ago and resisting change.
At least it was only her hair.
January 26th, 2009 on 9:28 pm
I’m envious of your relationship with Becca. How old is she?
January 26th, 2009 on 9:47 pm
She is 19. I could write 100 blogposts about her because I understand her so well- she is a lot like me. Like all relationships, that day was a culmination of all of our time together. We went through a period right after she graduated from high school where she literally hated me, and I doubted that her feelings would cool off. But they did, thank God, and here we are.
We’ll probably end up being old cat-ladies together!