The Long and Short of My Hair

It's almost midnight on a rainy night in LA. Twenty minutes ago I had a pair of scissors in my hand. I was thisclose to snipping off all my hair.

But I chickened out.

I have a lot of fear about cutting all my hair off and as the days continue to fly by, I've been reflecting a lot about what's behind this fear. I know folks will say that it's just hair and it'll grow back, but when you're a black woman in America, such a laissez faire attitude toward hair is not so easy to have.

I've found that getting to a place of comfortability with my hair is a little like unpeeling the layers of an onion. Like dealing with an onion, peeling back the layers of hair can also cause a few tears. It makes me think about the insidiously racist messages about beauty that black women, including yours truly, receive.

One of the most recent layers I unpeeled was chemical straightening (also called "relaxers" in case you didn't know.) Over the years I've gone back and forth with relaxers. In high school and college I used them, but didn't have the money for the upkeep so my hair didn't always look so hot. Post graduation/post life in China, I stopped straightening. --I need to learn how to use the scan function on my printer so you all can see some photos of how big my hair was after a couple of years of growing out all the straightened ends. I think it stood a good six inches horizontally off my head. I'm sure it would've been bigger, but since my hair was also pretty long, the weight of it pulled all the bigness down a bit. I'm not kidding. It was seriously the biggest, awesomest hair ever.

About four years ago I started straightening it again, mostly because I felt pressure to seem more "professional". It's hard to sit in a meeting with a principal or district official when you feel like you have the biggest, most unprofessional hair ever. Whether the pressure was real or a result of my own psychosis is certainly a fair game question, but let me just point out that we do live in a world where last fall, a Glamour Magazine editor told a group of lawyers the following:

"First slide up: an African American woman sporting an Afro. A real no-no, announced the 'Glamour' editor to the 40 or so lawyers in the room. As for dreadlocks: How truly dreadful! The style maven said it was 'shocking' that some people still think it 'appropriate' to wear those hairstyles at the office. 'No offense,' she sniffed, but those 'political' hairstyles really have to go."

Of course, Glamour did whatever damage control they needed to do at the time. But, I'm still waiting to see the pages of their magazine really reflect the diversity of black hairstyles. Actually, to take it a step further, I'm still waiting to see the models in the magazine reflect some true diversity, period. But maybe I'm somehow skipping over all the pages with black, Latina and Asian models.

Anyway, I was increasingly dissatisfied with straightening my hair. Every time I went to get my hair done, it took like five hours. It was also expensive, both in terms of the salon cost as well as styling products/conditioners. I needed all the conditioners and styling products because the more straightening and flat ironing you do, the more damaged your hair becomes. It's like a vicious cycle because it takes more and more effort to make it look decent.

I'd been considering going back to natural for about a year because I was sick of the straight hair and how flat and boring it was. The final straw was last July when I transitioned out of my job. About a week after I left, I went to get the roots of my relaxed hair touched up. My stylist was super busy chatting about her daughter. I was exhausted and not paying attention to any of it. Before I knew it, she ran the chemicals through not just my roots but through my whole head of hair. This is SUCH a no-no, not to mention it's never taken too much to straighten my hair in the first place. This second application of chemicals was a total disaster. My hair felt rough, it would not hold any kind of curl and it looked like straw.

I vowed to never go back to her again and then spent the summer dousing my hair in all sorts of deep conditioning treatments and avoiding my flat iron unless absolutely necessary. I figured the long term solution was to find a new stylist, but the thought of doing such a thing was really overwhelming. Most black women have the nightmare stories about the stylist everybody else swore was awesome and then they walk outta there half bald! AAGH! It's really hard to find someone you can trust.

I also didn't want anybody I needed to drive an hour through traffic to go see. I didn't want anybody's cousin Re-Re who did hair in her garage. And as much as I loved Dominican stylists in NYC, I didn't want to pay the Dominican stylist who'd opened not too far from me the extortion-type rates they were charging. So, I wore a lot of hats.

It wasn't till after school started last September and some issues with my eldest son feeling confident about his blackness emerged that I started really reflecting on how straightening my hair was sending my boys the wrong message. How could I tell them to be proud of their skin and hair when I was constantly chemically altering mine? And again, it's not like changing from flats to heels. Whether we like it or not, black hair is politicized. Because there's so much baggage tied to our hair, I felt like I was going along with the societal message that a woman of African descent is not as attractive if her hair is not long and straight.

I thought about how my son would see billboards of Beyonce up in Hollywood and he'd always comment that he liked her hair. I started explaining how it wasn't really her hair, that it was a lace-front wig. He'd look at me like I was crazy, and to tell you the truth, it made me feel a little crazy to be explaining it all to him. I thought about how I didn't want him to turn into one of those guys that only likes long, straight hair, or, even worse, one of those brothers that proudly proclaims that he only dates girls with light skin and long hair. I think if I ever heard my son say that, I'd throw up. So, I realized he needed to see a role model of natural hair in the woman he most closely identifies with. And that would be me.

In the past, growing out my hair from a relaxer wasn't such a big deal because I'd had stylists that didn't leave chemicals on too long or run them through my hair twice. So the difference between my natural hair and the straightened hair wasn't as noticeable. I'd rinse it with water in the morning, throw some leave-in conditioner and hair gel in it and run out the door. It would all curl up nicely. But this time though, it's really noticeable because my hair is so straight.

Since the end of October, my solution has been to straw set my hair. I wrote about all of that here so I won't rehash it. But once every week, I roll all my hair on straws and then dry it. The whole process takes about two and a half hours to do, but compared to the five hours I was spending dying in a salon plus daily styling, it's totally worth it.

However, I've been thinking for awhile now that I need to peel another layer off the hair onion. I need to just cut off all the over-processed, straightened ends and only have my own natural hair. I don't like being tied to a straw set but without it, the straightened part of my hair looks horrible. If my hair is shorter, I can just rinse it and go. But, I've never had short hair in my entire life. The shortest my hair has ever been is chin-length and I hated it.

I'm so afraid to cut it because I'm worried I'm going to look awful with a six-inch 'fro on my head. I do have a measure of vanity in my bones and, in case you didn't notice, I live in Los Angeles, the vanity capital of the world. I'm not trying to look like a buster.

Then I think about all those messages we women get about long hair and how all that feels like it's doubled for black women. I question everything, so I wonder, am I still perpetuating this racist insanity of aspects of a black woman's worth being tied to long, straight hair? Should I just take the plunge and chop it off? I know some of you have taken that step, so I'd especially love to hear you weigh in on this.

I know that with each layer of societal brainwashing that's removed, I get closer to my true self. I'm just not sure if I'm ready to give it a go with the scissors.