That Noisy Inner Child…

Preface: I am a grown-up woman, approaching the mature late-twenties.

Now that you know this important fact, let’s not waste any time…

 …A couple days back, I was sitting in the chair of a not-too-shabby salon.  It was one of those “narcissistic to the max” kinda days, and in the midst of it all, my hairdresser and I were indulging in a talk on all things wang-related…you know, regular 2pm stuff.

About halfway through our 18+ conversation, we heard the squeal of an 8-year-old mini-chick.  The entire salon looked up to observe the commotion.  A few seconds later, a collective “awww……” was spoken.

And why?

‘Cause she was pretty much the cutest little mini-chick ever.  Smiling, giggling, and batting her eyes at her effeminate man-boy hairdresser, she was charming the entire crowd.  All the while her mother looked on with glee, as if her precious little girl had just pooed chunks of gold (she was also one of those girls with cherry-red lips and giant dimples, a serious cutie).

So as mini-chick stole the show, you could see how everyone’s heart was growing warmer. 

Except for mine that is. 

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t like the mini-chick…not at all.  The more she giggled, the darker and colder my heart became, until eventually…I wanted to step on her face.

(is that horrible?)

Even as I write this, I’m shocked and appalled by my reaction; part of me thinks that my maternal instincts are frighteningly under-developed, and another part of me wonders if I’m seriously psycho.

The psycho-explanation is probably closer to the truth, but before you go ahead and lock me away, I think I have a reason for it all…

The truth: even though I’m all grown up, there are parts of my childhood that never died.  I think we can all relate, but let me just take it a couple steps further:

-there’s a noisy, whiny, “unsatisfied with how it went down in the 80’s” version of myself that lives in my heart, and every now and then, she comes out to play.

She looks like this:

As you can tell, she’s an angry mini-chick, and one of her glaring traits is really bad hair.  That’s an accurate historical description, because until I was 18-years-old (YES, 18), my mom would cut my hair.  It was a money-saving option for the family, so we could spend all our earnings on high-end curry for our Indian bellies (and no I don’t regret it…mmm…).  Despite the soundness of it all, “haircuts with mom” were a cold and unhappy experience.  She would take me to the musty basement (in the corner where the furnace was), bust out the scissors, and essentially hack it up.  No music, no mood-lighting, no aromatherapy, just “hack, hack, hack!”.

Not surprisingly, all my childhood haircuts looked like this:

 (why is the snowman better-looking than me?)

I suppose that explains why I wanted to hurt that 8-year-old chick.  I mean the simple fact that she was IN a salon, getting all pampered and feeling happy, it filled me with resentment; a stark reminder of the life I never had.

Of course, looking back on the incident, I sit here and laugh, because YES I’m a grown-up, and NO I’m not “bad-bangs-McGee” anymore.  Nevertheless, I can’t quite kill that bitchy inner child.  She’s still underneath the surface, a dormant psychotic sea-monster, eager to smack all your daughters.

And you know what the worst part is?

There are more of these chicks inside me (does that sound inappropriate?).  Like there’s the 10-year-old Romi who never got neon-bicycle-shorts, the 13-year-old Romi who wasn’t allowed to shave her legs, the high-school Romi who never had an actual date (sad but true), it’s just layer-upon-layer of regression…WHY WON’T THEY DIE?

Since I don’t have an answer to that, I think it would be totally cool to hit up a team of shrinks, and let them go nuts with the “psycho-analysis”.

If nothing else, it’d be excellent fodder for a medical journal, and maybe I could earn a tidy profit (so everybody wins!)

So yeah, can someone hook me up with Dr. Freud’s digits?