Since cutting off my permed hair a few years ago I rarely take hair advice from my mother. She’s the one who brags about having never worn her hair natural, let alone in the style of an afro. She recounts this bit of information to me smugly, as though this fact is an indicator of her high standards of social respectability and class. This used to upset me until I realized that for many women in my mother’s generation, politics of social respectability, the body, and class are all tangled up in their ideas about hair. When I came home for the holidays with a short afro, one of the first questions my mother asked me was, “Will you promise to grow your hair back for your wedding?” Never mind that I was single and not even dating anyone at the time.
These days my mother has given up on any hope that she will ever see her daughter with a perm again. But that never stopped her attempts to convince me to grow more hair on my head. And I continued to refuse her pleas…that is, up until 6 months ago when I started getting restless with my ‘fro and began thinking about growing my hair out. It was then that I thought about a comment my mother made after she saw one of my sistafriend’s locs. Unable to recall the proper name of the gorgeous “ropes” of knitted hair that hung from my friend’s head, my mother said to me, “You should grow you some twigs like your friend.” Though my feminist-black-consciousness-higher-educated self wanted to cringe, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at her use of the word “twigs.” After all, my friend is quite tall, very stately and has an aura of “deeply rooted-ness.” Kinda like a tree.
I always knew that I would eventually lock my hair but somehow my mother’s statement sealed the deal. So hear I am, finally taking my mother’s hair advice: like a tree, I’m growing some twigs.
Truth be told, I’ve always been fascinated with locs. Even when I had a perm I often had to resist the urge to stare at friends and total strangers who had them. But after starting the process of growing my own, my fascination soon abated. Locking is not so much a pesky hassle as it is a test of my patience and control, not to mention a quest into redefining my ideas about beauty and what’s attractive. Anyone who has ever gone through the beginning stages of locking with short hair will tell you: it is a TASK of sheer mind and will to convince yourself that it’s still possible to get ya sexy on when you have hair that looks like small worms standing straight up on top of your head.
I had plenty of exercises in deconstructing (western) norms of beauty when I went from wearing long permed hair to a short natural. But locking has presented even more of a challenge. Yes, it’s still been about deconstructing beauty norms, but locking has also been about trust. My close friends can attest that I was faithful, borderline obsessive, about getting my hair lined EVERY week when I had a short ‘fro. Not so with locs! I couldn’t shape them or neatly prune them…especially in the beginning stages. I’ve just had to trust my hair and whichever way it chooses to grow and knit itself together. Sometimes I take a look in the mirror and want to take a razor to my head and be done with it. And then there are the mornings when I wake up, slap on a favorite pair of earrings and walk out of the house looking FIERCE.
It dawns on me now that I’m locking my hair at a time in my life that is in itself filled with uncertainty, possibility and frustration. I find myself not only having to redefine and deconstruct my ideas about my self worth, but now, more than ever, I’m having to trust myself. Trust that though a lot about my life and sense of direction is vague and an utter mess, I will eventually figure some things out. And hopefully I’ll grow comfortable with the ambiguity of the things that I don’t.
Yeah, I’m like a tree alright. I’m sinking my roots into who I am authentically and trusting that my twigs and branches will come along just fine.
