A Confession

I'm not very talented with hair. I never have been. From the days of crimping (elementary school), sky-high poufy wave bangs (junior high), to shiny permed waves (high school), I never could manage whatever style was popular. Not very well, anyway. The one trick I managed to learn was to french braid my own hair. (No easy feat, that.) So when I wanted to do something with my hair, I usually braided.

Part of the problem was that messing with hair can take so long. And I really felt there were better uses of my time. Like sleeping, for example.

Well, as an adult, that legacy continues. I don't spend much time on my hair. Even on Sundays, the one day I usually dress up, I don't bother with much. The morning is frantic enough as it is. But since I'm not a big hair person, it also means I don't spend much time on my daughters' hair. Seriously, that would add maybe even an hour of hair styling to my morning, and I just don't care enough.

So here's my confession for the day. Except for Sunday (the girls do get their hair combed through before church), I rarely do more than pull some of M's hair back in a top knot. And with B, days often go by, sometimes even a whole week without me so much as touching a brush or comb to her head.

Does that make me a bad mother?

Be that as it may, it means the girls' curly, wild hair is often curly, wild, tangled, and sometimes matted. Yes, it's true. And when we went out to Mississippi, that meant TROUBLE. I was prepared for it (I thought). Terence's grandma is an extraordinarily opinionated woman-- I guess if I had managed to raise 9 children on my own with only a 5th grade education, I'd be pretty opinionated myself. Anyway, she got on my case last visit about my lack of attention to M's hair. Nothing had really changed in that department, except that now I had two daughters' worth of hair lacking attention.

Did she remonstrate with me this trip? Oh, yes. I got an earful of questions about why I didn't comb my daughters' hair, why I didn't let B's hair grow long, etc. Not only that, but after putting the kids to bed one night I walked into the room to hear her taking Terence to task on the subject. Poor Terence tried to defend me-- after all, he has been responsible for their hair before, and he knows what a time-consuming, torturous process that is for both parent and daughter. But Grandma did not accept the excuses.

I wish I could say that I just let the comments roll off me, like waves passing through. Rock me for a second and then disappear. But it's been bothering me enough to try and be a little better at it. Unfortunately, Grandma's comments didn't actually give me any more skill with hair. And let's face it, my girls' hair is not exactly french-braidable. So I've been trying to make their hair look better and feeling miserable because I'm not succeeding very well.

Aw, well. Soon enough M will be old enough to take care of her own hair. I'd better recruit someone else to teach her though. Otherwise she'll end up just like her mother!