Clara's Hair

     Last night I gave Clara a bath.  In our house, as in many houses, bath-time is pretty fun, except for the end, when it's time to wash hair.  Clara has more hair than most ten-year-olds, let alone most two-year-olds.  It's curly and falls halfway down her back.  A good rinse requires several cupfuls of water poured directly over her head (Alas, we don't have a detachable showerhead.  And Clara refuses to lie down in the bath so I can simply tilt her head back for a rinse.  She doesn't trust me.  With good reason).
     At first, it pained me to deluge my daughter every bathtime with the cupfuls of water.  Now it gives me a sort of diabolical joy.  She usually stands up while I hold onto one of her arms.  Doing a jerky little jig of misery, she sputters and gulps as soapy water streams over her face and down her little round tummy and her little pink piggies press so furiously into the bottom of the tub they turn sort of white.
     It's a very endearing and entertaining performance, however uncomfortable for her.
     "Mama, I don't like this!" she gasps with every cupful.
     "Look up at the ceiling!" Simon encourages if he happens to be in the vicinity.  "Close your eyes!  Close your mouth!"
     It is all for naught.  She's so marooned in the suffering of the experience she can't focus on what her eyes, mouth or head should be doing.
     "This is the best way," I tell Simon.  "It's like ripping off a Band-aid."
     Simon's dad gave us this rubber visor with a handle on top that you're supposed to use to keep the soap and water out of her eyes while you rinse.  Such things are always better in theory.  It's way too big for her head and has found its way into her toybox, where visitors mistakenly identify it as a boomerang or a shoehorn.  Sometimes I wear it when Clara and I play "grocery store" and I'm supposed to be the clerk.

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     When I was a kid, my mom would always say, "Beauty is pain!" when my sister and I complained while she brushed the tangles out of our hair.  She always said it with authority, as though John Keats himself had written the words, presumably just before he changed his mind about the nature of things and wrote "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty").  My mom's little maxim did shut my sister and me up though, not necessarily for its imagined profundity, but because we were thinking, "Does this mean when we finally get to see the Sistine Chapel ceiling it's going to feel like someone crushed our femurs?"
      I am now faced with the quandary of what to tell Clara when I brush the tangles out of her hair.
     "Owwwwww!  Mommy!  I don't like this!" she yells while I patiently pull at the cyclonic rat's nest on the back of her head (constructed through the dual evils of her swiveling the back of her head against her pillow all night and Simon's habitual use of his very easy, but very ineffective "finger combing" technique).
     "I do this, Mommy!" she sometimes says, wresting the brush from my hands.  She gives it a go and invariably ends up howling louder because the brush gets stuck in her hair.  Various de-tanglers do little to minimize the effect of "tumbleweed hair." Engine oil might work.
     Recently Simon's mom got us some hair products designed especially for little girls with curly hair.  I call Simon's mom Clara's "hair benefactress" because she, having naturally curly hair herself, understands its idiosyncrasies. The new hair products work pretty well.  They make Clara look like a delectable little cherub.  Which, unfortunately, makes it ever harder for me to reprimand her for, say, swinging on the oven door handle or doing gymnastics on her crib mattress.