Hair raising

I cut my hair down to the quick because it was getting on my nerves.  This week.  A few weeks ago I cut it down to the skull because some new product that promised to strengthen the short hair I did have on my head not only did not strengthen it but caused it to become brittle and dry.  I sheared it off to start over.  I'd been threatening this all summer, a massive cut, because I just could not find myself in the style that my slow-growing coif was presenting, and I wanted edgy, androgynous, strong and felt more like Dorothy Hamill mushroom or short-haired newscaster safety helmet.

I've given up on long hair. For me.  When we lived in Barbados, my hair grew like a wacky weed due to the climate, moisture, water, and raging hormones I produced due to the recent arrival of my second babe.  I wore it long and loose, top-knotted, with braids, shells, twists and left in the sand, conditioner, salt water (rinsing only the chlorine), and let the sun bleach it out.  This was a me I never imaged.  Super feminine, sexy, and girly.  Only now can I admit that I was gorgeous--sun-kissed, toned, long-haired.  I had headbands and rubber bands, barrettes and buns.  I put flowers behind my ears and looked so demure and precious that I felt like a character.  It was fun, truly.  But when we got back to the States, all that hair threatened my time management and the style (mostly a bun or a ponytail) made me feel undefined and misdirected. 

Since I was in seventh grade and a beauty school fuck-up destroyed my hair, my confidence, and my life in one afternoon's attempt at the ill-thought but insanely popular Jheri Curl, my hair has been short.  I want to say that I took to it effortlessly, but that would be a flat out lie.  I cried my face off for months as my pimply, awkward, pre-teen chubby face was forced to take center stage at just the moment that I wanted to wait in the wings.  I wore a headband for years, afraid to let the hair just be, hopeful that it would grow long and full and I'd be able to poof it to heaven like all the other 80's vixens (black and white).  It never dawned on me to wear a weave or a wig, they'd never have suited me, but I endured my wide open face on display with a tortured, simmering hurt.

My girls have hair down to their shoulders.  The oldest has the most beautiful mane of auburn, blond, and chestnut hair that coils and twists and extends from her skull out into the world.  When she wears it down, which is not often, she stuns.  She has no idea of the power that head holds, and not just because of the hair.  She struggles with the kinks and the knots and the fullness, but I have promised her that she will come to love it.  She's a Leo and I've told her that she will walk the world like a lion one day and will love her unruly curls.  For now, she wears it pulled back in a ponytail or bun.  My youngest has dark brown hair with auburn highlights.  Hers is wavier, thinner, and she loves it in side ponytails and topknots.  Her cascading locks makes her look older than her six years.  She's glamorous and girly and sweet.  She often wonders aloud if I want longer hair, if I want to wear ponytails, or if I "like" my hair short "like a boy."

I do.  Like it short like a boy.  This is my familiar style.  But it gives me no protection.  There is nowhere to hide and nothing to make me beautiful on days that I am not.  When my hair is short, super short like it is now, I have doubts and cannot slink under my bangs or wipe my hair back behind my ears.  When it is short like this I have to hope that a wriggle of my nose or a twitching of the corners of my mouth or a flutter of my eyelashes doesn't give me away.  With my hair short like this, anything and everything can be betrayed.  It was once just my feelings but now it's my wrinkles, my changing hormones, my sprinkling of greys which seem to show up better when my hair is worn close to the skull.

As soon as my hair is cut, I begin the process of starting to grow it back.  More as an exercise in its ability to still do that, grow, than in hoping I get locks flowing to my shoulders.  The truth is that it just doesn't grow like that.  There are people whose hair grows like weeds, a little water and light and the garden flourishes.  Not mine.  This is a black girl's story, and one that I will not tell with any fresher perspective than it has been previously told.  My hair, because of the way it grows, because it is coarse and kinky, does not grown like silken threads, returning in months to pre-cut lengths.  Mine can take years and breaks with frequency.  The growing out sometimes leaves me frustrated and I run to the scissors.  I can't wait.  I have no judgment or loathing of myself because of this truth; I have resigned myself to it.  The struggle is real.

The girls' hair, both some combination of my kinky, scrappy, nappy curls and my husband's fine, sweeping curls (of yesterday as he is now suffering from some level of hair loss that only occasionally strikes him as a horror) grows just fine.  Mine has always needed coaxing.  Oils and creams and potions.  Wraps, conditioners, and special combs or brushes.  It takes its time.  And I wait.  Until I can't.

Little girls with short pixie or asymmetricals, tight Afros or blunted bobs make me smile.  The gender specific styles really influence the littles and anything that runs counter to that makes me beam.  A friend has a daughter who brings her short cut, gold earrings, Star Wars, long shorts game every day and I call her my avatar.  To bring it like that, as a baby boo, is so epic.  The amount of judgment and projection that goes onto the shorn head of a woman or girl is pretty massive.  Sometimes even I can't bear the weight.  Yet she's all the way in and wondering what's wrong the folks who don't get her vibe, her style, not the other way around.

My crowning glory has to be my aura and not my hair.  My halo is in the ether and not on my head.  And though I sometimes have to shore myself up for each morning, each moment I pass the mirror, each time I reach to push my hair out of my face, and while I like my hair short, and have grown to love it over the past 30 years, I have never felt so seen and so naked.  I imagine that people can see through my skin into my heart, can read behind my eyes, can see my thoughts, so I run my hand over my head...but it's still gone.  I know it's not the hair.  The hair doesn't really supply the power.  It doesn't really protect or shield and it doesn't really make me more beautiful or more feminine.  I don't even really look like a boy.  But I have wanted to hide, to disappear, to go away, be invisible and unseen.  I've seen my youth and my wide-eyed wonder recede under that skull cap of a style.  I've seen my face loom larger, my eyes keener, my lines and wrinkles lightly tracing where I laughed and smiled and cried and picked.  I've seen my face lurch forward with something I'd not realized was there before.  Experience and wisdom.

I know things and I will not hide it.  I can't.  Because my hair is cut short to the quick and the truth is written all over my face.


(c) Copyright 2015.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.


Addendum:  This is my journey with my hair.  There is no judgment-stated or implied-for how others choose to wear their hair.  It has been a lifelong process for me, dealing with this hair, and what the styles say to society at large, but I am at peace with it.  Except for when I'm not.

Lady Bits: Bounce your boobies, Part 2.

Please.  Take your time.  I am just waiting on this news feeling like hearing it out loud could pull down the poll of the circus tent of my life and cause everything to collapse, hurting, maiming, maybe even killing some of the performers.  Was it two to three business days you told me?  Was Monday a holiday?  I checked the cell every few minutes thinking maybe the phone was still on vibrate.  Answered lots of solicitations on the home phone just in case, somehow, the call from Arizona was the lab, knowing full well that the lab was up the street and that it would, in fact, be from my doctor's office that the call came.  But it didn't come.  Not for two, three, four, five, or six days.  I waited and let myself be convinced and reassured by friends that no news was good news.  "They would want you to know right away if it was indeed C," still no one wanted to say it and I surely did not want to hear the letters that follow 'c' in that word.

My dear husband, seven plus years older than I am, always (so sweetly) reminds me that I am young.  "You are still young and beautiful." And this not only when he is feeling frisky.  Nowadays when we say things like this, it is often in relation to how much more of life there is to live, that yes I CAN still wear a short skirt if I like, do something crazy to my hair, start a new career, try new things.  But when it comes to health issues--aches, pains, pinches, twists, tears, and pulls, age has slowly crept up with us.  When I see pictures of some of my childhood mates, I see their parents' faces staring back at me.  I read posts about injuries from doing things that were once facile, part of every day movement until just the wrong thing slipped or "went."  We laugh about those pains.  "Getting old," we say.  But aging also brings more serious health concerns and a need to make at least annual trips to a physician.  The laissez-faire attitude of our youth has given way to consideration of each new freckle, rising cholesterol, too much sugar in the blood, lack of time for exercise or sleep, lack of time for anything really as a sign that we are creeping over that hill.  We feel young inside but our bodies demand us to acknowledge that time has passed and that we need to be tender with them.

My dance classes and my meditation practice, my family and my love for them gave me the physical and psychic strength to prepare for the worst news but really expect the best.  I, full to the brim with anxiety and too much nervous energy, found ways to distract myself from the waiting for results.  My house is now spotless and that includes all closets, drawers, cabinets, and the attic.  I danced my brains out and allowed people to love me, care for me, bring me food, invite me to parties, looked them back in their eyes to thank them, and just breathed in and out every single day.  I breathed to the top of my head and down to my toes.

On the fifth day I started calling and leaving messages.  I felt embarrassed to be calling as though it was expected that I'd wait patiently for the news.  I wondered, in all the prep I was given for the biopsy, had anyone in the medical profession thought about my feelings, fears, hopes, anxiety.  While I'd been warned not to take aspirin 48 hours prior, and been told how the procedure would happen (ultrasound, cleaning of the breast, numbing local anesthetic followed by a tugging or pulling sensation that would collect the cells to be examined, then days of soreness, bruising, swelling, a little pain, and a tiny scar underneath), very little was said about the shallow breaths I was taking, the tears that came to my eyes when I thought of having to tell the girls that something was wrong with Mommy.  When they kicked or pulled or tugged at me and accidentally hit my ailing breast, I'd wince and then smile.  I didn't want to give them anything to worry about. I was reminded only once to go back to my life as usual.  I felt, and I could be wrong about it but it felt this way, that no one wanted to say what it was they knew I was afraid of.  One does not go in for a biopsy the way one might for a new retinol cream for wrinkles.  The biopsy signifies there is something in there that is unknown and the big unknown, the one that sets most of us on edge, is fucking cancer.  I was scared shitless that I might have breast cancer.

For every day that I waited and meditated and danced and wore a brave face, I was scared, humbled, awed by the life I'd managed to make for myself.  For people who loved me, for a community I belonged to, for friends, family, strangers, humankind that had the urge to live, to be part of this carnival called life.  It had never been called into question for me in such high resolution.  Yes, I was full of anxiety in Barbados and did fear losing it there and once there was some crazy turbulence on a plane where we dropped a few feet and I grabbed the girls and cried my face off, telling them how much I loved them over and over again until we steadied, but I never put myself, allowed myself to see myself as old enough, ready spiritually, to imagine the end of my life.  Breathe in.  Breathe out. This I would tell myself every moment that I drifted to those thoughts.  Because that was what scared me the most.  I went all the way there every time.

A rogue nurse in the office sent me a secret text to tell me that the results of my biopsy were negative two days before my doctor's office gave me the official word.  I want to say that I danced on the ceiling, but I instead sat quietly on the floor, complete silence all around me, save the ticking of the clock in another room and the hum from the fridge.   I felt relief for myself and compassion for those, many of whom are my friends or family or acquaintances, whose tales don't or have not ended on this note.  I can still not touch the bullet resting on the inside corner pocket of my left breast.  The bruising and soreness has proven a longer healing period than expected, but I know my little lump is there.  I want to remove it.  It is no talisman and I am not brave enough to carry it.  Even knowing that it is benign, it presses at everything dear to me and threatens to pull the tent down.  I'd prefer a scar where it once made itself cozy, an 'X' to mark the spot where my fears were released and my dreams held tight in a deep inhale were released.

Do your self exams and get a mammogram, ultrasound, MRI, or thermal scan if you are over 40 or have a history of breast cancer. 


(c) Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.