I really liked that brush.

And I know that it probably doesn’t seem very manly for a guy to become attached to a hairbrush as opposed to something like a chainsaw or a flamethrower, but I’ve had that brush nearly forever, it’s been with me through grey hairs thick and thin, and I guess I always just sort of thought that it’d be with me until the very end when the last combable clumps had fallen from my tested and tired scalp, to only then get retired to my nightstand drawer of things that will never get used again like my baby blanket from when I was three and my first package of condoms from when I was, well, older…

Like so many things torn abruptly from my life as of recent, the loss of my most favorite-est hairbrush can most certainly be pinpointed back to one lone suspect wandering this house. He walks around like he owns the place, despite being less than three feet tall, leaving a trail of mayhem and destruction pretty much everywhere goes, and worst of all … he happens to be my two year-old son, so it’s not like I can evict him or take the cost to replace my beloved brush out of the kid’s rent or anything!

I don’t know if every toddler goes through the I wanna be Ringo Starr and/or Animal from The Muppets-phase of drumming relentlessly on every surface imaginable with every makeshift drum stick imaginable, but that’s where we’re at right now with ours and let me tell you, I don’t appreciate being a drumming surface anymore than the inanimate objects that he parades around the house with enjoy being his preferred instruments of destruction. It doesn’t matter if it’s a measuring cup that he stole from the dishwasher or a hairbrush that he stole from the bathroom – this kid loves pounding on things, and I guess I wouldn’t mind except for the noise, and the hurting, and the trail of broken stuff that I’m finding is pretty much inevitable in the daily life of a toddler on the run.

There’s a part of me that wonders – where is he picking this stuff up in the first place??? It’s not like he watches me or his Mom walking around the house, just beating on every old thing that we pass like we’re in a never-ending game of Rock Band and once again we got relegated to playing the drummer because somebody else already called the guitar. I mean, sure, the dog occasionally attacks his bottom relentlessly with her sniffer when he’s got a dirty diaper because she’s kind of twisted like that, but I think that’s an entirely separate issue altogether! They don’t hit things on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or Sesame Street, and I haven’t let him watch Fight Club for Kids in ages…

As I’m sure that many parents who’ve come before me have already thought, I think my best hope might very well be that this too is just another phase in the ever-changing life of a budding toddler – like his I eat bananas and only bananas!-phase or his subsequent I hate bananas and how dare you present me with bananas to eat!-phase – and that ultimately another two weeks from now when he learns how to talk, we could just as well find our son trading in his makeshift drum sticks for a karaoke microphone as he wails unintelligibly through the house with the dog chasing him about his diaper the entire way.

Sadly, though, that still leaves me without a hairbrush, which I suppose I’m just going to have to chalk up to another casualty of parenting right alongside the countless shirts that I lost due to unrecoverable feeding or changing incidents as well as my convertible that couldn’t really accommodate the three days’ worth of provisions required for a simple trip to the store with a toddler in tow anyways.

Memorial services for my favorite hairbrush will be held at my bathroom sink each morning until my kid breaks something else and forces me to move on and just go buy a new stupid brush already…