*warning: some images in the post may be disturbing. Proceed with caution!
I've always felt like Oprah and I share one thing in common: our hair. Obviously, her hair is a different
color than mine, but I've had about as many different hairstyles, and I thought my hair had about the same texture and required the same amount of work. But seeing the movie
Good Hair a couple of weeks ago changed my mind. I was amazed at what black women (and men) go through to have good hair. The chemicals they use to straighten their hair are so strong that they can burn your scalp. (I'm sure any straightener CAN burn your scalp, but these chemicals are much stronger.) The process of getting a "weave" is not only time consuming, but costly. Like $1,000. And these were not wealthy people. These were school teachers and day care providers. Anyway, it started me thinking about my "troublesome" hair and I decided I wasn't so bad off after all.
I started out life with hair that was thick, manageable, and with just enough body to hold a curl.
My mother did such a great job with my hair, that there were many pictures of me from the back.
But somewhere about the time I finished 7th grade, my hair turned on me. I entered puberty and my hair changed to being coarse, wiry, and frizzy. I tried to pull off the popular "flip" hairstyle. Check out those bangs and cat-eye glasses! This is a reminder of how awkward junior high was.
By the end of high school I had tried various things to make my hair straight. I tried ironing it. I tried a relaxer called "Curl Free" that was supposed to make my hair straight. It didn't. I toyed with trying the relaxer with the black girl on the box... I was sure my hair had more in common with hers. I settled for setting my hair on 3" diameter rollers while my hair was wet so that I could wind it tightly making it would as smooth as possible. This, however, required me to have my soft-bonnet hair dryer on for 3 hours so that it would dry. Twelve hours in rollers was not enough--it would still be wet in the morning, so I usually ended up going to bed with the hair dryer on and waking up in the night and turning it off. I'm sure that wasn't a fire hazard or anything. (Note: blow-dryers hadn't come on the scene yet, neither had straighteners.)
Even though I lived in Ventura, close to the ocean, I disliked going to the beach because of what it would do to my hair. Hours of work could be undone just by going to school on a foggy day! Oh how I longed for swingy hair that would dry straight.
When I got married, I decided I had to wear it short. The blow dryer had been invented, so that was a help.....
but big hair can sometimes overpower the face!
I've spent a greater part of my life fighting with my hair. Sometimes I've embraced the waviness and put gel on it, but I've never really liked it that way for a couple of reasons:
1. once you gel it you can't touch it
2. you have to gel it while it's still wet and since my hair takes forever to dry, it's usually wet all day. I hate having wet hair.
3. once you sleep on it, you have to wet it again to get it to look good, see #2
Various appliances have been invented over the years to assist people with hair like mine, but it still takes time. A lot of time. A full 15 minutes to dry the hair until it looks like this:
And then another 20-30 minutes to use the large barrel curling iron so that you look normal.
When my children were young, I didn't have that much time to spend on my hair, so I usually wore it short.
Or somewhat short.
I occasionally tried wearing it long, sometimes with disastrous results! What was I thinking??
I don't think you people with naturally straight hair know how good you have it. My mother-in-law used to tell me that I was so lucky to have curly hair. Uh, no, you mean frizzy hair? Lucky? So, you people with straight hair? Doesn't this make you happy for the hair you have? If it doesn't, go see the movie.
If you know Laura, it will be no surprise to learn that she came into this world at her own pace. She wouldn't be hurried. It didn't matter that with my previous two children (first births don't count!), I delivered them within 2 1/2 hours of getting to the hospital. This held true for the two births after Laura as well. So when we arrived at the hospital on November 7th around 8:00 am, Mark was in his suit, prepared to go on into the office in San Francisco after witnessing this 4th child's birth. However, Laura had a different agenda. She took her sweet time. The contractions spread out, so it wasn't a harder labor, just an inefficient labor. She waltzed into the world at 1:15 pm.
I know that it irritates some of my other children, but Laura was a perfect baby. Her APGAR score was a 10. The nurse said she'd only seen one other 10, and that was a pediatrician's child. But more than that, she was an easy baby, an easy teenager, just an all around easy-going young woman. Her outlook on life is upbeat. She looks for the good in people and experiences.
One year, when she was playing Little League Baseball, she went to tryouts by herself (it was at the school across the street from our house.) Tryouts consisted of them pitching three balls to you, hitting three high flies to you, and hitting three grounders to you. When she came home, this is the conversation we had:
Me: How did tryouts go?
Laura: Good.
Me: Did you hit any of the pitches?
Laura: No.
Me: Did you catch any of the high flies?
Laura: No.
Me: Did you get any of the grounders?
Laura: No.
But she thought tryouts went well.... This makes Laura sound more unathletic than she really is. She's always up for trying something new. She played baseball, she was on the swim team, she played soccer, she took piano lessons, she took flute lessons, she took voice lessons (David thought she said she was taking BOY lessons), she did well in school.
When Mark gave her a name and a blessing as an infant, he blessed her with a sense of humor. I was sort of surprised, I had never heard anyone do that before, and I remember thinking that she would need it in this family. I mean things were pretty chaotic with an 8, 5, and 3 year old besides her. But what I've come to realize is that yes, Laura has a good sense of humor (like the rest of my children), but with Laura it's more like BEING in good humor. When she was about 18 months old, I wrote in my journal: "Lots of people will tell me how good-natured and happy she seems to be - and she really is. Everything is a joke to her. I wonder what she'll be like when she's older."
Interestingly enough, Laura was born a year and a day after my miscarriage. I felt like I had been pregnant an awfully long time and I had gone through morning sickness twice to get her. Was it worth the wait? I think so.
