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.

Father's Day

I have to confess that no matter how hard I've tried to distance myself from some of my dad's behavior, there is no denying it.  My mom is as cool as a cucumber, but my dad, all moist-eyed and sensitive, all curious and excitable, all passion and rage and angst and joy, is me.  A girlfriend of mine has told me repeatedly to cherish the time with my parents, to celebrate and relish who we are to each other while we can as both of her parents are no longer living.  I have listened, though often not heard her because I am all moist-eyed and sensitive, all passion and rage and angst and joy.  I am, in so many ways, the Mini to his Me. 

He and my mother visited this Father's Day, stayed in our home for the first time (not including Barbados which was not actually ever our home), spent real adult time, played with the girls, went on our errands, meandered through our town, and enjoyed ourselves together.  We visited with family friends and I felt adult and grown and proud to be with them.  I am not sure if it is my midlife crisis which looks more like actualization than crushing breakdown, my recent interest in meditation and reiki, my return to dance, or the shifting of our collective consciousness, but I have found acceptance of who and what I am and therefore in who and what everyone around me is.  I have found the desperate need to hold on to past hurts and wounds to be exhausting and have forgiven them, though more than likely not forgotten them. (I am, after all, a Penn.)

I have spent much of my life recognizing my role as a member of my family and feeling that I was failing miserably.  No matter how this thinking came about, I felt overwhelming pressure at being "the daughter of/big sister of/first grandchild of."  The burden of carrying on the line of two incredible families, the credits, achievements, and successes of which are extraordinary by any standard, but given that they were done by those poor and black, largely undereducated, during the dark days of our country's history, made them mythic, epic, heroic.  I felt like a straight up fraud.  Middle class, indulged, allowed my mood swings and artistic tendencies.  I didn't have to give up my dreams, whatever they were, in order to put food on the table or a roof over my head.  The fight over outright racist and sexist policy was fought on their backs while they were striving for the promised American dream.  I had a kind of survivor's guilt because I did not struggle to achieve what was seemingly handed to me, because the racism, sexism, and white privilege that I faced was more subtle, because I had been walked to third base by a family that persevered in getting into the stadium and onto the field.  Though I know now that I did not need to apologize for myself, I was then so sorry and ashamed.

Under the weight of that, my father and I would look at each other, mirror to reflection, reflection to mirror and declare, under our breaths, "What?"  There was so much expectation, so much want, so much need and no real way to express it.  So there was moist-eyed, sensitive, curious, and excitable passion, rage, angst, and joy.  I would cower in his presence, hold my breath, not feel safe expressing myself as I did when "away from home."  I was miserable to be around, was either pulled in and tense or exploded when provoked(like someone I know), hated family get-togethers because I did not feel like I could be myself, because what I reflected back to Mr. Penn was too much for him to see.  It might even still be. 

But there are new facets to this diamond.  The glittering, fascinating shine of my children.  And in my children and how they are being raised and how they behave and love and give, I believe that my dad and I can share something, love something together.  We can see that part of each other that loves, that cares, that is all moist-eyed and longing.  Like two shy, nervous baby birds we just might dare to fly, helping each other do so but also concentrating on our own flight.  As I see him soar, I feel joy.  He might not tell me, but he feels the same for me.  We have this story to tell, this epic tale in which to contribute.  Like that game where one person starts the story and another picks it up where he leaves off and then another picks up and so on and so forth until an incredible tale is told, we are living and weaving our lives. 

We are much alike, but not entirely the same.  My father wanted to be a journalist but that gig did not pay well enough for a young man who had the obligation to help put his younger siblings through school as his older siblings had done for him.  He has something to say but often chooses his words carefully, sparingly, and certainly does not express his feelings or wear his heart on his sleeve.  I, on the other hand, did not have that financial responsibility, did not make a choice based on monetary need, cry, laugh, love, freak, and respond to every stimulus, and even when I might keep my mouth shut, cannot do so!  I want to say something; I have to, come what may.  I respect his choices, his sacrifices, and know that he loves us.  I hope, hope, hope that he feels the same for me because this Father's Day, I allowed myself to love him like I did as a girl.  With wonder, curiosity, awe, and the first twinkling of autonomy that a toddler shows when she realizes that she and her parents are not indeed the same entity.  It was truly a great day to celebrate having and being a father.



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

All Apologies

I do my best.  I am with my girls alone a lot.  Their day to day is primarily, well, entirely, my responsibility.  I do my best.  But there are certainly times when the stress, my emotions, the weight of it all gets to me and I let it out!  That usually comes in the form of screaming and yelling and carrying on and saying stuff crazier than even my parents said when they were yelling at me.  Truthfully, I feel terrible about it, especially when swear words come into play.  My people know that Mommy says bad words and rather than copy me, they are trying to reform me.  It takes a village, you know, to raise up everyone.

I hate it though.  When I have come to my wit's end and I unleash.  I hate seeing them looking at me, hoping, wondering, willing me to be better, and I am petty and tired and frustrated and mean.  The difference though, between my experience and theirs is the apology.  After every outburst, every lashing, every moment when I know there is a better way to handle things, we talk about it.  We talk about my feelings and theirs.  We talk about what made Mommy get to the crazy, especially when the crazy is not at all their fault but the fault of my being tired and overwhelmed and shocked as shit that I have woken up as the person in charge and I really just want to chill out for a second.  They are learning, at the same time as I am, how to deal with their emotions and the emotions of others, how to listen, how to laugh, how to rage, how to respect, and how to love. 

I never quite understood as a girl or teen or young adult or older one that one can have the full range of emotions, truly, and still be cared for, still be loved, still have a place in a family or group.  I have tried to present, to represent, rather than just be myself.  I do not want this for my children.  I do not need them to be proper, young ladies at the expense of themselves.  Of course I do not want them to be cruel or selfish, but I want them to be themselves fully, to accept and feel and express their full range of emotions.  So when I laugh, I laugh hard.  And when I cry, the tears are hot and if I am not hysterical, visible.  And when I am angry or frustrated or frightened or at my end, I tell them,.  I show them.  And I apologize when I hurt them in anger, when I am make them feel small, when I take them down with me when anxiety controls my head and heart.

I feel like I am apologizing all the time.  So often that I sit up at night and hope that they will come through it alright.  That they will know that their mother loves them more than anything she ever had or has since they came.  I tell them how I am learning this as I go, that we are all learning and often confused and sometimes selfish and once in a while irrational, but that we all come back to this.  That we love each other, live to make each other happy, support each other on this journey, and are able to say we are sorry when we break the promise to love and respect each other.  Saying sorry is one of the hardest things, I have found, for children to learn to say truthfully, not just mouthing the words, not just repeating what adults ask them to say, but meaning in their hearts.  It is also hard for adults.  There are many apologies I deserved and did not receive.  I still feel the sting of not hearing those words following particularly cruel assaults and emotional betrayals.  The girls will hear them from me.  They will know that I am trying, that I tried, and that I have honored our pact to love, respect, and support each other on the journey.



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