A Question of Hair
I have never been a hair expert.
Exhibit number one: My 9th grade picture.
My hair was the bane of my existence growing up. It wasn't fine and straight, but it couldn't just be fully curly either. It was kind of a semi-frizzy, wavy-ish, super thick mass. As a really young kid my mom just had my hair hacked off, and for most of my younger elementary years it was boy-short. (Made for some interesting class pictures because when it started to grow out it never looked like a cute little pixie cut or anything.) But the last time I ever cut my hair short was in junior high-- and I was so appalled by the result I have never cut it shorter than shoulder length since, not in almost 30 years.
Anyway, my point being, I barely coped with my own hair. It has been a real challenge to have three daughters, especially since my daughters' hair is wildly more difficult than my own unruly hair was. By some miracle I managed to get M to the stage of caring for her own hair as a teenager (even though that means we deal with daily hour long showers) and I've had little to do with it since. Thank goodness, because M's opinions and my opinions on her hair don't match, and I have enough battles with the 17 year old without adding hair to the mix, thank-you-very-much.
Now I've been trying to repeat my kind of success with B, but it has become painfully obvious that this is not going to work. B's hair is an exponentially more difficult type than even M's. She can kind of wash it on her own-- but she still needs someone to help, because it is so thick. And she can't comb it out. It takes ME almost an hour to comb out her hair. And of course, she wants to keep her hair as long as possible. *groan*
For the last couple of years, our pattern has been different for summer and winter. In summer we wash her hair once a week and do a full comb-out. Then we just pull it back on the top of her head in a ponytail that is really more of a giant poof. (This is also something B cannot do on her own. It is a serious task of strength and skill on my part, honestly. We usually break several hair bands trying to manage it.) If it is winter, well, the wash and comb out happens every other week, and we do a full comb and and a head full of two strand twists. It takes me anywhere between 5-7 hours, depending on how big the twists are.
So last week it was time to jump back into the twists. (Swimming season is over. I won't do the twists during summer because it is way too much work to just get wrecked every time she jumps in a pool.) Just for fun, here is her washed, combed-out hair before we started:
This week was a mammoth session, 7 hours long because I was trimming her ends as I went. We made it through two and half Spiderman movies (B's current passion is Spiderman). Here was the end result:
It is working out OK but I'm starting to worry. This is in no way something B can do for herself, and I can't do it forever. What can we do to get B self-sufficient with her hair?
I've been wracking my brain and I just don't know. I think she'll have to cut her hair short, but she hates the very thought of it. And B, like so many young teens, struggles so much with her body image that I hate to make it worse. She doesn't need to hate her hair as well.
The funny thing was, when she went to school with her hair twisted, she had people asking if the summer poof hair was fake!!
They have NO idea.
Exhibit number one: My 9th grade picture.
My hair was the bane of my existence growing up. It wasn't fine and straight, but it couldn't just be fully curly either. It was kind of a semi-frizzy, wavy-ish, super thick mass. As a really young kid my mom just had my hair hacked off, and for most of my younger elementary years it was boy-short. (Made for some interesting class pictures because when it started to grow out it never looked like a cute little pixie cut or anything.) But the last time I ever cut my hair short was in junior high-- and I was so appalled by the result I have never cut it shorter than shoulder length since, not in almost 30 years.
Anyway, my point being, I barely coped with my own hair. It has been a real challenge to have three daughters, especially since my daughters' hair is wildly more difficult than my own unruly hair was. By some miracle I managed to get M to the stage of caring for her own hair as a teenager (even though that means we deal with daily hour long showers) and I've had little to do with it since. Thank goodness, because M's opinions and my opinions on her hair don't match, and I have enough battles with the 17 year old without adding hair to the mix, thank-you-very-much.
Now I've been trying to repeat my kind of success with B, but it has become painfully obvious that this is not going to work. B's hair is an exponentially more difficult type than even M's. She can kind of wash it on her own-- but she still needs someone to help, because it is so thick. And she can't comb it out. It takes ME almost an hour to comb out her hair. And of course, she wants to keep her hair as long as possible. *groan*
For the last couple of years, our pattern has been different for summer and winter. In summer we wash her hair once a week and do a full comb-out. Then we just pull it back on the top of her head in a ponytail that is really more of a giant poof. (This is also something B cannot do on her own. It is a serious task of strength and skill on my part, honestly. We usually break several hair bands trying to manage it.) If it is winter, well, the wash and comb out happens every other week, and we do a full comb and and a head full of two strand twists. It takes me anywhere between 5-7 hours, depending on how big the twists are.
So last week it was time to jump back into the twists. (Swimming season is over. I won't do the twists during summer because it is way too much work to just get wrecked every time she jumps in a pool.) Just for fun, here is her washed, combed-out hair before we started:
This week was a mammoth session, 7 hours long because I was trimming her ends as I went. We made it through two and half Spiderman movies (B's current passion is Spiderman). Here was the end result:
It is working out OK but I'm starting to worry. This is in no way something B can do for herself, and I can't do it forever. What can we do to get B self-sufficient with her hair?
I've been wracking my brain and I just don't know. I think she'll have to cut her hair short, but she hates the very thought of it. And B, like so many young teens, struggles so much with her body image that I hate to make it worse. She doesn't need to hate her hair as well.
The funny thing was, when she went to school with her hair twisted, she had people asking if the summer poof hair was fake!!
They have NO idea.
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