Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

The MomChop

Back when I was a student at the BYU, I noticed a strange phenomenon cropping up among young, newly married women: the MomChop. All of a sudden, it seemed like everyone was getting married and then immediately cutting off their hair. Some women waited until they had a baby, and then the MomChop concept expanded to include wearing sweats and a baseball cap on campus, in public, during the day. I noted these developments at the time and filed them away under the "withhold judgment" category, to be revisited when I was actually in that situation myself. (Also in that category: moms with crying infants on airplanes and moms who breastfeed in public.)

I've been married for over seven years now, and my oldest child is three, so I think we can take that dusty MomChop off the shelf and have a closer look.

First, I've had long hair pretty much all my life. I think the shortest it's ever been was in fifth grade when I got it cut to my shoulders.

I got married. I still had no desire to drastically reduce the length of my hair.

Then came baby #1. Hmm. I could kind of see where these women were coming from. Nature plays this mean trick on new moms where post-partum hormones make your hair fall out at the same time your baby learns to grab. The result is stray hairs all over the house and in your baby's tightly clenched fists. Not fun. Especially not with really long hair.

Which brings us to baby #2. And this is getting old. I may have long hair, but you'd hardly know it since it is wound up in a bun or braid nearly all the time. So I have to experience all the care and inconvenience of having long hair without enjoying any of the benefits, Jeremy's compliments notwithstanding. So for the past month or two, I've been considering doing a MomChop.

I made sure to go about it carefully and thoughtfully, even trying out some hairstyles that would keep my hair more or less out of Magdalena's reach while still displaying its longness. It was nice to give my long hair one last hurrah, but that's what it ended up being - the last one.

Because this morning, I got my hair cut. I really don't want to call it a MomChop because deep down, I'd like to think that I'm different from that girl wearing sweatpants, a ratty t-shirt, and a faded baseball cap in the BYU library so many years ago. But maybe I'm not.

Here's before:


And here's after, in all its awkward freshly cut glory:


It's way shorter than I thought it would be. I donated the cut hair to Locks of Love (I've done that twice before and still never ended up with very short hair) and I should have remembered that it always ends up shorter than you think it will. Now I feel kind of like a plucked chicken.

Ah, well. At least it will grow again. And then I'll be able to tell you whether the MomChop is all it's cracked up to be. And whether Jeremy has forgiven me yet.

There is ALWAYS something worse

Flashback Friday: Photo Shoot