Audrey's hair follies

All my life I've had hair issues. The short version would be to go see the movie Good Hair by Chris Rock. See all the stuff that black women go through? That. Or you can just put in "hair" in the upper left search box from my  blogger homepage and see all the time I've devoted to just talking about hair.

I've often said that I got Audrey's hair to deal with for cosmic retribution for cutting all mine off. Hers is curly and unruly and gets easily matted. In all honesty, it's a colossal pain but I know not to say that in front of her. It was all positive, positive, positive. She has often said in the past that she loves her hair and she's glad that she's the only one with hair like hers in her class but last week I found her crying in her room.

I couldn't get much out of her but what little I did get had to do with her being tired of struggling with her hair and "pretending" to like it. I got the feeling that someone said something unkind about it.

I could have taken the hard way and talked and talked and talked until I was blue in the face, telling her that God (or whoever) doesn't make mistakes. I could have tried to work on her self esteem for weeks and months to get her to love her matted locks. But knowing me the way you do, you have to know that I took the easy way out. I went straight to the pharmacy and bought a couple of boxes of relaxer. Then I bought a blow dryer, a straightening iron and a fat barreled curling iron. I also bought a brush, some special conditioner, some kind of stuff to protect from heat damage and hair spray. Grand total: $200.

It took nearly the whole weekend but it went from this:

To this.

The smile on Audrey's face was worth every penny and every minute I spent with smelly goop on my hands. She's nearly 13 and at that age all you want to do is fit in. She'll probably learn to love her hair but not until she's an adult. You always want what you can't have and all she wanted was straight hair. I could give it to her and I did. It's taking me some time to get used to her hair the way it looks now but I'm coming around. All I have to remember is that my curly girly is still in there and she'll come back out when she's ready.

*** Sleeping in 90 minutes because I'm running later today for dragonboat warmup = AWESOME!***


kxx