That was when Wyatt stopped getting haircuts.
“Wyatt, you look like a sheepdog,” I told him that November. “We’re going to the barber.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
He looked at me across the kitchen table. Dead serious.
“Mom, I’m going to grow my hair out so Harper can feel like herself again.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time.
I couldn’t.
I just stood there at the sink with a dish in my hand and tried not to cry in front of my thirteen-year-old son.
I can’t even begin to tell you how proud I was of him.
It wasn’t easy.
Boys at school called him Rapunzel. Somebody put a hair tie on his locker with a note that said FOR YOUR PRINCESS. His baseball coach told him to cut it or sit the bench.
He sat the bench.
He grew it for eighteen months. Through two school years. Through a summer that was too hot for long hair. Through a hundred jokes.
