The decision to lock my hair came well into the pandemic, a year in to be exact. Memories of my mother’s freeformed locks kept begging my attention. One in particular haunted me. I was very young. Maybe 6 or 7 years old. I was growing up in Brooklyn with my daycare nurse turned godmother and grandmother looking after me in cycles.
One day I was walking with her in Lincoln Terrace Park. She asked me what I thought about locking my hair. At the time my hair was always straightened or plaited. She was the only person I knew and spent significant amounts of time with who had locks. I told my mother that I did not want locks because I would look ugly with them. People loved my hair when it was straight and shiny. Whenever it got kinky, it became a problem for others to deal with. I hated the feeling of being a burden on those who watched over me so I naturally submitted to the way my hair was trained.
My mother’s name is Tammie Lee. Tammie gave birth to me when she was 17 years old. She is a Cancerian like me. My mother thrives in infamy within the halls of my memory. Much of what I know about her was fed to me by others who felt obligated by love, pity, or some strange mix of both to explain away her bizarre way of being. I know for a fact that she was raped as a young girl and that she never really felt safe after it happened. My grandmother told me that Tammie is naive and that this was a dangerous way for a woman to be.
When I look back on this exchange between myself and my mother, I cannot help feeling ashamed of my limited understanding of beauty. Of course, I realize I was only a child and that I was subject to the particular kind of nurturing I was receiving at the time. And yet, in all of the silence and fullness of self I have been finding in the midst of the pandemic, it became difficult to forgive myself for what I was starting to see as a betrayal to the woman who brought me into the world. She wanted to connect in this way but I resisted because I was afraid of what the people around me would feel about my choices. My instincts told me there was something intrinsically beautiful about me that made people want to step in on my mother’s behalf. How could I give that up?
Early on in the pandemic, I found myself leaving in the braids or two strand twists I would set my hair with and I liked what I saw in the mirror. It was almost like I was a kid again, like I had the ability to turn back time and change the direction of that talk with my mom in the park all those years ago. When I finally sat down and comb coiled my own hair into little spirals, I was immensely proud of the work I’d done. It was not long into my journey when I began to see the implications of training my hair this way.
I cut my locks off six months into my journey with tears in my eyes. I was literally called ugly by people I didn’t even know. Walking down the french quarter minding my business, a young girl on the phone remarking on her distaste for my appearance. The clerks at Urgent Care 11 having a healthy round of kee-kees at my expense when I stopped in for a COVID test. I liked putting my baby locks in high pigtails which would remind people of Minnie Mouse, apparently. I hated being compared to a disney character for a heap of reasons I don’t care to get into right now. And then there were those who would call me ugly by implication, saying I was going through an “ugly” phase. Never quite took to that phrasing.
I became obsessed with my hair, spending hours attempting to tame, retwist, and style my baby locks so that I would be acceptable to myself and the world. Taking pictures and recording the changes helped me feel a kind of stability that I liked. I did get compliments, too. And I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit to enjoying the time spent with my inner child in the mirror, soothing my spirit with tender loving care. I felt powerful on my best hair days. Totally in tune with God, self, and nature.
Still, the cost for that particular kind of peace was becoming too great. My locks were veering into a semi freeform direction that demanded a lot of attention. Knowing my enduring struggle with time management and the fact that I was in the market looking for work, I knew I needed a change. I was on a threshold, standing between the space of the inner child and the space of the woman I am destined to become.
The emotional environment I inhabited from day to day ceased being about what others thought and became more about the version of me that lived in that alternate past reality, telling her mother that locks were ugly. I wanted to let go of those weighty feelings that kept me tied up in regret, guilt, and longing for my mother. I experienced 6 months of what she had lived as a lifestyle. Seeing the world through her eyes is what I truly wanted when I started locking and I was heartbroken by the things I saw and felt. Shearing my baby locks away was a transition and an intentional initiation into womanhood. One thing I learned about the mysteries of womanhood as a dread head is that purity of thought and feeling is never anyone’s responsibility but my own.
Tammie and I share the basic bond of a mother and child that can never be invalidated. Trauma is such a buzz word now that I almost wince at the use of it here. I will say emotional pain and painful memories instead. The painful memories that I have as the daughter of a woman who has experienced acute emotional pain, who is also the daughter of a woman who has experienced an entirely different character of pain, is the key to the remedy that frees me. In other words, I am my own magic.
There is much that is said about trauma and toxicity. Toxicity is a fact of nature. As a plant mom, I am aware of the special ways life adapts in order to thrive. When plants evolve to contain poisonous and toxic substances it is not because these plants have endured shit loads of trauma and are doomed to spiral downward into a hellish world of damaging triggers on repeat. Evolution required that the toxin become a part of the plant’s design because there are forces in the world that might harm that plant’s integrity. God equipped that plant with the tools to protect herself from those forces that are not in support of her well being so that when the inevitable happens, at least she is not defenseless in the face of an attack.
It is so comforting to know that mama nature has my back in a world that constantly tries to convince me that my life is worth nothing.
I know we live in times where anyone with access to a search engine, one or more social media platforms, or the latest New York Times bestseller feels he or she is equipped to diagnose and speak at length about complex psychological and neurological processes. However, with all that knowledge available out there, none of it comes close to what I can estimate about the spirit I house in this body through my own intuition. If I decided to fight my still voice and to side with what “people are saying” I would doom myself to a life of drifting. People are always saying something or another. More often than not, people are not thinking critically anyway. I have begun to interpret the unwarranted opinions of other people as smoke on the wind. There is nothing the wind cannot usurp, remove, or clear away. I continue to look to her for the clarity I seek.
Now that I have cut my hair I feel free to see the world through a haze free lens. I am proud of the fact that I tried and even prouder to know that when life looks differently, I can and will try again.
