Like most black women, I have had a complicated relationship with my hair for most of my life. My hair is been styled in so many ways, thankfully most of them in the 90’s before camera phones and digital cameras were as a common to catch any of my bad decisions. I have shaved my head, permed my hair, had various types of extensions, dreadlocks, and currently it’s natural.
When I was a small child, I don’t remember caring about it much other than preferring my aunt over my grandmother to braid my hair because I was super tender headed and my grandmother braided too tight. I was cured of my tender headed-ness by a hairdresser I had after we moved to AR. Talk about a tight braid! I discovered years later that she never knew I was tender headed, otherwise she would have gone easier on me.
My hair has never grown very quickly and my own hair has never been longer than shoulder length (when I had dreadlocks). Otherwise it’s usually bob length. Most of my problem is that my hair grows pretty slowly and I also have breakage issues. All I have ever wanted is my hair to be long enough to put in a ponytail without having to use booby pins or hair clips to keep it all up.
While I long for longer hair, I also like to change my hair pretty frequently. The longest I had ever had a single hairstyle or cut is when I had dreadlocks. That lasted 6 years. In addition to my many hairstyles, I have dyed my hair most of the colors in the rainbow, starting when I was 11. My natural hair color is a dark brown though I’ve been dying it black for the last few years.
I have been really struggling lately not to significantly change my hair. My current goal is to wait until after I get married in October. I really want some waist length box braids but that’s expensive and since we’re mostly paying for the wedding ourselves, it’s a non necessary expense that I just can’t justify. My other thought it to cut my hair- short on the sides and longish on top. I think it would be a little easier to manage and since it would an actual hairstyle, theoretically easier to maintain. Or I may give myself up to the mercy of a hairdresser.
I’ll keep collecting ideas but for now, it’s just daydreaming until October.
