so i started to comment on one of dawn's great hair posts and decided to make it into a post over here instead.
when we came to the decision to adopt an african american child, hair was a major topic of discussion in the indie household. hair frightens hubby - he grew up with fourteen some east coast italian female cousins - hair was something that he wished he never had to hear about. he's not very good at doing hair and he mostly remembers tear-ridden sessions
of attempting to style younger cousins' hair while babysitting for
them. so when we were discussing transracial parenting, one of his bigger fears was that he'd actually have to learn how to do hair. we talked about our beliefs about hair relating to our potential black children and decided up front that natural hair was the only way to go for us. we also had conversations with our 'cultural consultant' (the agency had us name which individual in our lives would be our cultural consultant in raising our children) about hair, had hair training sessions with her and her multicultural children (aa/latino/chinese), recruited her to do a hair training session for our adoption agency's transracial adoption seminar for potential adoptive parents, had field trips to the local african american beauty supply store, discussed braiding, twists, locs, permed hair, nappy hair, ready nappy hair books, discussed hair etiquette. she thoroughly trained us. and it was fun - we had a great time preparing for our child in this way. and i know a lot about african american and biracial hair now.
but i still have issues with zade's hair and how it's perceived by the black community. we live in a predominantly black neighborhood. for some reason, the young children we see, by and large, have totally unkempt hair. i'm talking styles that are not styles (hair barely pulled into a knot on the top of the head), hair that is so dry it would crack like twigs were you to brush it, frizzies sticking out at all angles, no grease or moisture. once children get to the point where their hair is long enough, it's straightened. there are a few children with neatly kempt braids, some with beads, some with extensions. there are zero children that have natural hair in a fro. except zaidee and the two biracial girls with a white mama and a black papa who live right behind us. they tend to go for the fluffed-out fro, we most often go for the lots of twisty spiral curls a la macy gray.
zade writhes in pain and anger when we do her hair. she's a little more tolerant in the bath and most often gets her hair done while playing there, but she doesn't get a bath every day, so there are many days when it's all i can do to spritz her with water and finger-comb her curls with some sort of moisture-adding product. she always looks kempt, in my opinion, but towards the end of the day she's got some frizzies on the ends of her spirals. that's just what you get with nappy hair. and we're happy to be nappy here in our household. we touch up the frizzies when we're going out - but sometimes we end up out and haven't lubed her up recently. on special days, or whenever z will allow me the chance to corner her for thirty minutes, i put her hair in multiple piggy tails and lube up the ends to prevent frizzies - and sometimes i allow them to fro out into puff balls. but how often will the most active two-year-old in the world allow me thirty minutes of futzing with her hair? yeah. not often. so that's like once a month.
there are so many things i want to say about hair and how it affects our lives. it is, i promise you, the cultural thermometer that determines whether or not we fit into our neighborhood. if her hair is looking good, the grocery store is a sea of smiles. if she's having a lazy day (which, oh yes, i will allow my daughter - and trust me - i know the consequences) we hear lots of sighs and harrumphs walking through the aisles. hubby doesn't see the difference, but he heeds my dictation that z must go out with, at the very least, a spritz of water and some moisturizer on her head. even then, that's often not enough. one night a table of women next to us at our favorite ethiopian restaurant i distinctly heard the words 'lose your appetite' in reference to z's slightly-fluffy-around-the-edges state. but i'm not recounting these things so that we can get angry at the inappropriate comments or reactions to my family. no - rather - i find the comments interesting, deeply culturally ingrained, amusing. sometimes people are spot on (on lazy days - and on lazy days i'm also clearly unkempt) and sometimes i think it's something to do with the overwhelmingly straightened hair we see in our neighborhood and sometimes i imagine it stems more from frustration surrounding our adoption of a biracial child and sometimes i think maybe it's way deeper than that. what my family represents to the african american community isn't something that's always flowers and cupcakes. it represents eons of institutionalized racism. so the comments - yeah - i think they're warranted. in the whole big scheme of things. yeah, i got the white liberal guilt going on here. but i also know that my daughter's hair is healthy, given it's proper cultural status in our family, extremely well-cared-for. and i know that i'm educated about it and that's what really matters in the whole big scheme. right?
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i would love to be able to do cornrows on z now - and her hair is getting to the point that it's long enough for a braided style - but she's not got the patience for it yet - and i don't think it's healthy for her to have me force her crying into a hair doing session. i don't want to fight this battle her entire life - so i'm trying to raise zade in a hair-positive environment. there is already such a stigma around black hair in our society that we're trying to make sure z knows that her hair is fabulous in all of it's wonderful and crazy states. when i put piggy tails in my hair, i try and interest her in having the same (it works!). those days we do a style. but z's personality is just not one that meshes well with long hair sessions on a daily basis. and i don't want to be the kind of mom that strong-arms her into things. i need her to want to cooperate with me. so we work on it. and when she's a little older and can reason with me, she'll learn through consequences. yeah, call me a hippy mom. go ahead, i'm ok with it.
z's hair is further complicated by the fact that she's biracial, i think. her mama pea has beautiful blond long loose loopy locks. pea has very, very fine hair and oh so much of it. we don't know what purl's hair is like, but we're told it's brown and curly. z has the very very fine hair of pea and the tight spiral curls of purl. so when we do a style - her hair slips around in my fingers - there isn't a lot of texture to it - those curls long to spiral up together in little, beautiful clumps - and it doesn't hold the style for more than half a day. so it's not like i can cornrow her and let her be for a month like some kids. we have to re-do hair every single day.
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because my friend (our cultural consultant) has been busy with her own life lately, i've been thinking of putting an ad up on craigslist for someone to teach me to cornrow and show me what styles will be easiest for z's type of hair. i may go and do that soon. i know a lot of the teenage girls in the area are great at doing hair (from my non-profit work in the same neighborhood) - so i'm hoping to find someone who wants to earn a little extra cash and help me out at the same time.
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so this is our experience with hair. people who live in communities that are predominantly white may have a totally different experience than us. but for us, hair is a huge thing.
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