HAIR RAISING
Everyone is talking about Barbie. As I noted in the Impersonating Magical Beings: Birthday Fairy story, I never had a Barbie. The only toys I remember were the Fisher Price garage (with car elevator and ramp), the smash’em up cars and a bathtub of Lego. The toys I had; were the toys my brothers had already had. I had one doll: a creepy Chucky-esque monstrosity that had its hair cut to the quick and blue marker scribbles all over its sexless naked body. It was called 'Batman'. I didn’t/don't know from Barbie.
I associate Barbie with girly girl stuff: bubble gum pink, wardrobes of ‘outfits’, make-up and hair styling.[1] None of which are things I could/can relate to. While my classmates had Treetorns with heart laces and Cotton Ginny easter-egg coloured leisure sets, I was sporting hand me down Kodiak ‘Grebs’ and cords with the ridges all worn away at the knees. Throw in a baseball T and put a BB gun in my hand and you have a fair idea of where I was in the Barbie time of my life.
This trajectory has continued. To this day I feel like I am playing dress up anytime I am required to look like an actual adult/woman. The furthest I can get down the feminine road is my collection of black Patagonia dresses - of which I have six and rotate between them like an outdoorsy goth Charlie Brown. Whenever I see the makeover shows on HGTV, I marvel that no-one has nominated me. (Please don't. If the Fab Five show up at my door, I can promise you I will not embrace the experience.)
But mostly the whole Barbie thing reminds me of how completely unprepared I was to be the mother of girls. I never expected to have girls. I have two older brothers and 13 male cousins. Despite having gone to a girls school, and a girls camp, and being...you know…. a girl…my reaction to the news that our first kid was a girl was:
“A girl? I dont know anything about Girls!“
My reaction after learning our second kid was a girl was:
“Two girls? I know nothing about Sisters!”
By the time C came around, I was hopeful for the triptych and the chance to put all the girl related learning to use.
You might think there’s no difference between raising girls and boys. You would be wrong.
A case in point: hair.
Hair was the cause of the first realization I was in over my head in the girl waters. Quick backgrounder, I frequently forget to get my hair cut for more than a year at a time.[2] I am a person who properly manages her hair so infrequently that when I do, it is grounds for commentary:
Kind girlfriend: "Your hair looks great!”
Me: “Thanks, I washed it."
So, when H arrived back from getting all dollied up by the maternity ward nurses with her wispy hair in tiny braids like she was a toy poodle, I was panic stricken. I thought: “I don’t know how to braid hair! I am not sure I even know how to part hair!” And this is before it became clear that there is hair, and then there is SUPER POWERED hair.
When Hannah was a baby she had a halo of dark curls, which every single person felt the need to point out to me as though I was blind.
“Your daughter has great curls!” Thanks.
"Those curls are amazing!! Indeed.
"Wow have you ever seen curls like that?” Yup, every day actually.
“They are so springy!” Please don’t touch my kid's head. [3]
There is a HUGE learning curve for curly hair. Things you may not know:
1) Curly hair requires approximately $1 million worth of products (only a slight hyperbole), the application of which bear little resemblance to “Lather Rinse, Repeat”. These include pre-poos, hair masks, dry-poos, defining gels, cleansers, leave in conditioners, silk pillowcases, diffusers, straighteners and special combs and brushes.
2) Curly hair has a designation system. There are four types of curly hair, and three or more subtypes. Each of these types and subtypes requires a different array of processes and products. Our girls have three different types of curly hair, which means that their shared bathroom houses about 100 different bottles of hair potion.
3) Curly hair MUST be cut by a curly hair expert. These experts are closely guarded secrets since they are in such demand, you must book a trim 6 months in advance. Finding such a person is so essential that on the off chance you see someone with the same hair type as you, you should be prepared to bribe, or possibly even torture, the name of their hairdresser out of them.
4) Curly hair has many, and strict, rules about when and how one should wash/brush/cleanse/deep condition etc. your hair according to a complex decision tree: if yes then...if no then… I don’t know what any of these guidelines are. I do know that I do it all wrong.
For the most part my efforts at managing the girls’ curls was mainly focused on fending off dreadlocks. This worked until middle school when social media came on the scene and H became aware that I was failing on the whole hair care front. She took matters into her own hands and found a hair salon that specialized in curly hair: Curls of the World. Upon arriving, the staff start quizzing H about her “hair routine”. (My hair “routine” consists of jamming my hair (wet/dry, brushed/unbrushed, clean/greasy) into a Dollarstore elastic band.) Among the recommended routines was slathering one’s hair with Coconut Oil, wrapping it in a silk scarf and leaving it in overnight. I am alarmed. If I put Coconut Oil on my head, I would look like I was coated in grease... until it all grew out. (On the plus side one would smell like a macaroon.) Over the course of the haircut, there is MUCH “tsk-tsk-ing" and head shaking about H’s complete lack of knowledge and the dire state of her hair. I am sitting over on the purple divan under a cloud of parental shame. Sensing my guilt, the hairdresser pats me on the knee, and with a mixture of pity and disdain, says “That’s all right, dear. You didn’t know any better.” In fact, much of my parenting efforts fell under the “didn’t know any better” umbrella.
For S, her hair started out confused. Parts would curl into ringlets while other parts would be dead straight. This resulted in an untameable combination of snarls and fly away that gave her the appearance of a troll doll pencil top after you had spun the pencil for a good while. This Einstein look was in part (/probably) the result of having been shorn as a toddler. When S’s curls started to manifest, they were mostly at the back of her head where she couldn’t see them. Her 3-year-old sister H - you know...to help her out - decided to show S her curls by cutting them off her head. One after the other. After a while, H comes into the dining room, dull craft scissors in one hand and a corkscrew of hair in the other:
H, super excited: “Look! S has curls too!”
Me, super not excited: "Uh-oh.” (But less PG)
In the next room, I find S surrounded by a sea of hair slinkies. Her head is now a motley of tumbleweed and bald spots.[4] We hightail it to the hairdresser, who said she would “try her best”, but was quick to absolve herself of the result. This was (of course) the night before S started preschool. In her very first, first day of school picture, S is wearing a bucket hat, with a blotchy pixie cut underneath.
A friend, years later, told me that when she first laid eyes on S, she thought “Who would do that to their child?”. If by “that”, you mean who would relish the fleeting moment of peace and quiet while ones children are occupied in the next room…doing who-the-heck-knows-or-cares what. The answer is: me. I would. It all ended well. It took S’s hair about ten years to recover but is now all gorgeous ringlets.[5]
By the time C hit the age that she cared about her hair, I was ready - if only because I could just leave her in the hands of TikTok videos and her sisters’ hard-won know-how. Either way, my limited stylist skills were not required. C’s hair invariably looks like she just got a $100 “blow out” (decode: dried with a hair dryer and one of those big brushes - the kind that I tried to use once, and got it so ensnarled I had to cut it out of my hair with toenail scissors). It often looks full glam - long, and full and in big bouncy waves. Ironically, kind of like Barbie’s. Except paired with a wardrobe consisting of ~100 different Value Village sweatshirts with graphics like howling wolves or monster truck “Mud Week”, and thankfully right inside my girl spectrum sweet spot.
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[1] Yes, I know, Barbie is also an astronaut and heart surgeon. But she does those things in a stereotypically feminine way: with glam waves in her hair and perma-stiletto feet.
[2] I have only ever had an actual hairstyle three times: my mid teen crisis (short and long), my mid-life crisis (when I thought long hair wasn’t appropriate for a 40-year-old) and the OG bowl cut that made me look like a human acorn hybrid.
[3] To be fair, the urge to touch curly hair is hard to resist. It is so tactile. The girls occasionally grant me permission if I ask nicely, and not too often. Only one “Spring!” allowed.
[4] This was a step up from the time I walked in on H leaning over her infant sister with a blue marker in her hands, about to “give S blue eyes like me.” (!!) Near miss, that one.
[5] S has lived in some very humid environments lately, which makes her hair curl so much it fills the whole video screen.
Me: “Is it raining in Vancouver?”
S: “How’d you know?”