Training Day
I've just gotten out of the shower (post-workout and relaxing time in the whirlpool & sauna) and having washed my hair for the first time in months (not that I'm complaining about my bi-monthly trips to my hairdresser for sessions with a hot comb) I now have to decide how I'm going to go about straightening it again before my scheduled visit to Brenda (my hairdresser) next Saturday. The thought of spending the rest of this Saturday night in the bathroom with a blowdryer & unproven products from Sally's has left me contemplating procastination. I mean, I could just comb it back into a bun, let it dry as much as it will naturally, and deal with it before church tomorrow morning. After I combed the leave-in conditioner into my hair and put a cap on it a little while ago, I sat down for a bit to let the leave-in conditioner do it's work on my sweet natural hair (I do love my natural texture). I thought of what I looked like when I got out of the shower.
With noticeably looser curls in the back and post wash and conditioning straight top and sides, my hair was unusually tame before I'd coaxed it back into a bun and covered it with a plastic cap. "It'll be easy to straighten tomorrow," I thought to myself as I considered sleeping with my hair undried. "But why is the texture of my hair changing?" I thought since I haven't touched it with strong chemicals in over 2 1/2 years. Then I remembered what the new accountant at work (the one from STL with the natural hair who boldly sported her natural styles when she moved to NO 2 years ago) and my girlfriend Aja (the one I ran into on a business trip just before I moved from NO) had told me: "You have to train your hair in the way you want it to go," which was echoed by my sister (the one with the twins) when I tried doing my niece's hair on one of my last trips to ATL. "You have to braid her hair [insert the correct direction here] to keep her ponytails from sticking up like Pippy Longstocking," my sister said. "Well, I didn't know!" I replied.
My experience with braiding hair is more than limited since I never had a younger sister or cousin to practice on. It's also part of why my hair looked like a cross between Nat Turner, Don King, & Michael Jackson (in the Jheri curl years) for most of my life after I was 7...my mom convinced me to get a curl when my parents attempted running a hair salon in the mid-80s [can you say failed business and bad hair choices in one sentence?]. My hair didn't look it's best until a year after I moved to NO. After 4 years of natural hair growth to start with (I stopped relaxers when I got pregnant with Shorty) and only getting a relaxer because I'd moved to the humidity capital of the US, I had enough money to go to the salon on a weekly basis and maintain my relaxed do on a regular basis. My hair was beautiful! But I longed for the texture and health of my natural hair after life, stress, & chemicals made it fall out, thin, and break off for numerous reasons.
With Shorty living in LA with his dad for a year (I finally had the money to get extensions & braids) & support from the new accountant from work, I started growing my hair out again. Even with Espen & Katrina (the stress of rejection from what I thought was my soulmate, coupled with no available braiders), I managed to not cave in to getting a relaxer. After seeing my friend Jamaal's home with him for the first time (he lived a block away from the lake and had 8 feet of water in his home for a month), I reached rock bottom (or as I like to call it, my scalp). I cut off the remainder of the relaxer from my hair just a week before my 31st birthday, and haven't looked back since.
Although I'm going to have to learn to balance my newly revived healthy lifestyle (eating right & exercising [aka, a black woman with natural hair is IA's worst enemy]), focus on my career (which is based on an early morning work schedule) with my love for my natural hair, I know it's worth it. I believe that if I persevere, time and gravity will balance it all out. The time I spend caring for and training my hair to accentuate my natural curl pattern, combined with the weight of the length of my natural will lead to a beautiful pattern that even my father (an African man who spent his entire career as a cosmetic chemist focused on how to straighten black women's hair) couldn't have imagined. And it all comes back to training.
I believe that black women's hair is the root of our people. We have to train our men like we train our hair, and the earlier we start, the better. We have to train our hair to do what we want it to do, to look the way we want it to look in the future. If we want our daughters (and nieces) to have long healthy hair (whatever the texture) when they grow up, it's best to start when the girls are small, and be consistent. We have to treat our men the same way. We as mothers have to train our sons to behave in the way we want them to be as grown men, in spite of the men we currently have to deal with. We have to train them as boys to respect women and themselves, so they don't grow up to be mysogonistic and/or lazy men. It's really up to us, black women, to decide the fate of our people. And it begins with our hair because a woman's hair is her crowning glory. It's a reflection of how she treats and feels about herself. So we must find the effort to train our own hair, in whatever pattern works at the time, and also train our sons/boys. In doing so, we set a pattern for the future. And so has begun my training day.
Footnote: I went to bed with my hair tied down in a bun and didn't take it out until Sunday evening. With less than 25 strokes of the blowdryer, my hair was mostly straight, and it took only one hour with a ceramic curling iron to straighten & curl (simultaneously I might add) my hair into my current flip do...all minus the burnt hair smell I leave the salon with every other week. I'm starting to love Iowa, even if only for the lack of humidity that allows me to have the option of straightening my natural hair with a curling iron after soaking in a hot tub & sauna post-workout!
With noticeably looser curls in the back and post wash and conditioning straight top and sides, my hair was unusually tame before I'd coaxed it back into a bun and covered it with a plastic cap. "It'll be easy to straighten tomorrow," I thought to myself as I considered sleeping with my hair undried. "But why is the texture of my hair changing?" I thought since I haven't touched it with strong chemicals in over 2 1/2 years. Then I remembered what the new accountant at work (the one from STL with the natural hair who boldly sported her natural styles when she moved to NO 2 years ago) and my girlfriend Aja (the one I ran into on a business trip just before I moved from NO) had told me: "You have to train your hair in the way you want it to go," which was echoed by my sister (the one with the twins) when I tried doing my niece's hair on one of my last trips to ATL. "You have to braid her hair [insert the correct direction here] to keep her ponytails from sticking up like Pippy Longstocking," my sister said. "Well, I didn't know!" I replied.
My experience with braiding hair is more than limited since I never had a younger sister or cousin to practice on. It's also part of why my hair looked like a cross between Nat Turner, Don King, & Michael Jackson (in the Jheri curl years) for most of my life after I was 7...my mom convinced me to get a curl when my parents attempted running a hair salon in the mid-80s [can you say failed business and bad hair choices in one sentence?]. My hair didn't look it's best until a year after I moved to NO. After 4 years of natural hair growth to start with (I stopped relaxers when I got pregnant with Shorty) and only getting a relaxer because I'd moved to the humidity capital of the US, I had enough money to go to the salon on a weekly basis and maintain my relaxed do on a regular basis. My hair was beautiful! But I longed for the texture and health of my natural hair after life, stress, & chemicals made it fall out, thin, and break off for numerous reasons.
With Shorty living in LA with his dad for a year (I finally had the money to get extensions & braids) & support from the new accountant from work, I started growing my hair out again. Even with Espen & Katrina (the stress of rejection from what I thought was my soulmate, coupled with no available braiders), I managed to not cave in to getting a relaxer. After seeing my friend Jamaal's home with him for the first time (he lived a block away from the lake and had 8 feet of water in his home for a month), I reached rock bottom (or as I like to call it, my scalp). I cut off the remainder of the relaxer from my hair just a week before my 31st birthday, and haven't looked back since.
Although I'm going to have to learn to balance my newly revived healthy lifestyle (eating right & exercising [aka, a black woman with natural hair is IA's worst enemy]), focus on my career (which is based on an early morning work schedule) with my love for my natural hair, I know it's worth it. I believe that if I persevere, time and gravity will balance it all out. The time I spend caring for and training my hair to accentuate my natural curl pattern, combined with the weight of the length of my natural will lead to a beautiful pattern that even my father (an African man who spent his entire career as a cosmetic chemist focused on how to straighten black women's hair) couldn't have imagined. And it all comes back to training.
I believe that black women's hair is the root of our people. We have to train our men like we train our hair, and the earlier we start, the better. We have to train our hair to do what we want it to do, to look the way we want it to look in the future. If we want our daughters (and nieces) to have long healthy hair (whatever the texture) when they grow up, it's best to start when the girls are small, and be consistent. We have to treat our men the same way. We as mothers have to train our sons to behave in the way we want them to be as grown men, in spite of the men we currently have to deal with. We have to train them as boys to respect women and themselves, so they don't grow up to be mysogonistic and/or lazy men. It's really up to us, black women, to decide the fate of our people. And it begins with our hair because a woman's hair is her crowning glory. It's a reflection of how she treats and feels about herself. So we must find the effort to train our own hair, in whatever pattern works at the time, and also train our sons/boys. In doing so, we set a pattern for the future. And so has begun my training day.
Footnote: I went to bed with my hair tied down in a bun and didn't take it out until Sunday evening. With less than 25 strokes of the blowdryer, my hair was mostly straight, and it took only one hour with a ceramic curling iron to straighten & curl (simultaneously I might add) my hair into my current flip do...all minus the burnt hair smell I leave the salon with every other week. I'm starting to love Iowa, even if only for the lack of humidity that allows me to have the option of straightening my natural hair with a curling iron after soaking in a hot tub & sauna post-workout!
posted by N'j at 7:13 PM
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