I sat with my 14-year-old son recently at a barber shop in the city center of Ramstein. This was after a week’s long exchange about the merits of his haircut, his lack of enthusiasm to use the on-base barber- which fit both budget and function for the last several cuts – palpable and bubbling. “You don’t understand, because you don’t cut your hair at a barber!” he screamed down the hall. So, I told him to do his research, find a place his friends would approve of, and he would pay the difference. It’s a luxury, not a right.

When O was younger, he told people he was half-black. I let him exercise his growing identity, knowing that at 7, he didn’t grasp that he was half-Mexican, and not anything akin to Black, Haitian or African. But at that age, he understood race as simply Black and White, knew his biological father was Mexican and knew I was as WASPy as you could get with my EuroAmerican blue veins in my prematurely wrinkled hands.

At 9-years-old, O announced that he wanted a perm like Odell Beckham Jr. with the bleach spot on the front. Again, I agreed, knowing that he would never survive the baseball season, growing his hair to the required length, and sweating in the Northern California sun. Additionally, with all the world telling him what he should and should not look like, I felt confident that a callous peer would steer him away from this decision before I handed over a credit card. I was correct, and he took the buzz cut within 6 months.

Then came the box braids pledge of 2021-2024. This was harder to swallow, but his favorite rapper had this hair style, and he felt confident that he was older and more self-disciplined and could try growing out his hair – this time to his shoulders – in order to get his requested hair style. We watched YouTube videos on braid installation. I tried to explain that, while his hair was very thick and wavy due to his Mexican blood, he still did not have the Black hair texture needed to hold the style like his idol did. He was undeterred. My husband was in dismay – a military man who spent his youth playing water polo with short hair and zero fashion idols – and didn’t understand why any boy or teen would spend this much time agonizing over their hair. “Cut it off and go play outside.”

But he knew better than challenge the pair of us – I was hell-bent on being the mom that, when he told these stories someday, always supported her kids’ ideas. Always gave autonomy. Always agreed. And who let the world do the dirty work of forcing the status-quo. When my kids look back, they will see pictures of outfits they picked themselves and a mom who cheered them on, regardless of how I would have liked to control their appearance.

But then his hair stopped growing rapidly once it hit his earlobes. A part in the middle, a flip on the one side and a cowlick on the other. He was quickly termed Lord Farquaad by the quippy teenage girls of his class. It was laughable, accurate and cruel. As a mom, I couldn’t convince him it was time to cut his hair. I let the callous world do that.

I had long-since accepted, without fight or denial, that his peers would take the place of his parents when it came to sage counsel, trend-setting, and character development. I refused to hold on so tightly that I strangled any chance of our communication surviving the teen years.

At this point, he still curled up in the morning, waiting for me to rub his back or play with his hair. He still studied at his desk with his light-blue, pilled baby blanket wrapped around his neck like a boa. He still told me when he made mistakes, or was nervous about a test. I knew I was succeeding at being his mom. Of all my roles, I knew I was doing this one right. So far.

We dealt with that for the next several years and then one fall day, he asked my husband to take him for a haircut. No fan-fare. No fuss. I was in South Carolina at the time with my own dad on our annual road trip. I saw the video and cried that I wasn’t there. But really, they were tears of joy. This chapter was over.

Now here we are, waiting for a “Blow Out Low Fade” at a barber shop in Germany. We have only been here 2 months and the shift to 8-grade angst has chucked all on-base barbers to the depths of exile. Only the “real” barbers know how to do a Blow Out Low Fade like he wants. Again, to O, all good barbers are black. Or Dominican.

We wait 2 hours for his turn, and he is increasingly nervous. First, I am the only mom in the shop, the only woman in the establishment at all. The music is Dominican, and in Spanish, and the barbers are laughing and chatting and the vibe is similar to clubs I frequented when I was “that girl” during “that time.”

“Do you want me to wait outside? I can just give you my credit card.”

“No! It’s fine. Stay.” He barely talks to me the whole time we are there.

I pretend not to be excited to still be tolerated. It’s a mixed bag though – I want him to be confident and independent, and in most other areas he is. But here, now, he needs me. And I like to be needed, so I stay.

Because it is silent, I sink into my favorite childhood pastimes- daydreaming, observing, and overthinking. I see my reflection in the mirror behind a patron: My three-day-old hair is barely presentable with half a can of dry shampoo. I haven’t worn makeup in more weeks than I remember. I stopped caring about my ankle skin showing above my socks (because I refuse to buy all new socks because crew socks are now in, and who has that kind of money?), and my heavy, shapeless down parka makes me look more like a dollop of sour cream than a woman. I am a mom. Just a mom. These barbershop masters see me as O’s mom. Nothing else. I think about the hip-hop beat playing overhead and feel who my reflection used to be.

I can close my eyes and remember listening to this music and moving my body in way that says “I am a good time. I love to laugh. I am easy to talk to. Come give me attention.” The nights when there was nothing better to do than explore the freedom of being twenty-something. Some days, I could pull it off as a thirty-something. The freedom of my limbs beckoning as they writhed in the sky above, casting a spell, hoping for a cure, waiting for love. The easy laugh, the light touch of a hair on bicep, the lingered eye-contact. I was a pro at that game. To be the object of desire, if only for one dance, one hour or one night. But that game has long-since been played out, boxed up and shelved. I couldn’t make these barbers see me that way. Not under any circumstance.

17 years ago, I lived in Germany right after my undergrad. I was an internship at a Child Development Center at Vilseck Base outside of Nuremberg. I was 24 and fraternized amongst the young men who had just arrived from Basic Training. Babies. Barely 18. The base had a 90% deployment rate at that time, so the only men around were either administration on their way out, or fresh-from-camp servicemen. The chaos of that time was electric and addictive, and not appropriate for this story.

Now, here I am, returned, a mom. The girl spinning on the dance floor, huddled over a Screwdriver, taking shots of Patron, hides somewhere deep inside. I cringe to think that my 14-year-old sitting next to me would ever understand who she was. The ways I would crawl out of the fog of inebriation to repeat the same wild pattern day after day, I am happy to shelve to save his vision of me. I am even more devastated for the versions of that girl he will meet in his own strange bars, on his own, strange adventures, until one day, he, too, is just a dad.

Youth is a Venus Fly Trap. Sexuality, the teeth. Delusional invisibility, the numbing saliva. I knew how to lure men, but not keep them. I knew how to be flirtatious, but was never taught how to simply be friendly. I knew how to say “yes,” but never a confident “no.” I knew I would get older, but I don’t know how to be ok with it. I am not a fussy forty-one-year old woman. I am careful not to sexualize my apparel in mixed company – This is a trauma response I am still unpacking – nor do I pretend that every member of the opposite sex wants to sleep with me. However, there was a point in which all of this was all that I was. I didn’t trust myself to gradually get older. I just surrendered to it one day. Recently, it seems.

The reflection in the mirror told me that I was the object of my own, simple desire and that was enough. My teenage son wanted me close by at a new barbershop for over 2 hours, and that was enough. My husband falls over himself to communicate love, adoration and respect, and that is enough. My therapist reminds me to put my thoughts down so I don’t hurt my own feelings, and remembering that is enough. I have a healthy premenopausal body, fresh acne on my hairline, cleavage pimples from night sweats and discoloring rosacea, but that is also ok. The reflection doesn’t lie: youth was a great chapter. But now, I am just a mom with her foot tapping to Dominican music, shapeless and waiting for her son’s haircut.