We've just returned from an overnight trip to England. We had fun -- or as much fun as a family with an angsty, brooding 13-year-old can have, which is a surprising amount, actually, even with the odd sulk -- or two.
Our youngest is a champion sulker. I can't help but brag here: she has always been well ahead of her age group, having started sulking at seven months, way before the average onset during the terrible twos. People told us she wasn't really sulking, but believe me, you had to be there -- she was.
She is also contrary. Bear in mind that like every other adolescent, this kid can go through hot water like an SUV chugs fuel; if I don't come banging on the door, she will happily spend up to an hour in the shower. Once we got settled in our hotel room, my husband and I agreed that for once we could take a break: we didn't have to monitor the kids' shower time so rigidly.
But she wouldn't take a shower. Why not? Because she didn't have her hair straightener with her and could not risk getting her hair wet.
Words almost fail me here as I struggle to express how much I hate hair straighteners, hair straightening products, hair irons (or whatever they are called) and all the advertisers who promote their consumption and use. I hate all of them with a burning passion. I hate them on behalf of every poor deluded female out there who thinks her hair ought to conform to some stupid beauty standard someone else thought up. These products are noxious and fiddly and hair-damaging and expensive -- and largely ineffective, as if you've got hair that is bushy, curly or kinky, it can be beaten into temporary submission, but it will never be sleek. And I could kick myself all over Scotland for ever allowing my eldest to buy an electric hair straightener.
When I initially said yes to a hair straightener, I figured it was just a stage. I thought that our eldest, who is lazy, would soon tire of all the fuss and bother of daily hair straightening. I reasoned that the reactions of others -- "Ewww, what have you done to your hair?" -- would make her see reason and persuade her to leave her naturally curly hair alone. Boy, was I wrong: she still uses it. What did happen was that the youngest started thinking that her hair, also naturally curly, wasn't slick and sleek enough. She began begging her sister to straighten her hair -- and bellyaching on the days that she didn't have time to do it. Quarrels began in earnest: "You promised you'd straighten my hair!" -- "Buy your own straighteners, you little freak!" And so on.
I come from a family of bushy-haired people. My sisters and I used to take turns ironing each other's hair, which was silly, because no sooner did we get it wet than it went right back to its natural state: bushy and untamed. I am largely Caucasian, but it was Angela Davis who first gave me the idea that hair didn't have to be sleek. My apologies to Ms Davis (I know it infuriated her to be known mainly as a hairdo), but I'm betting that along with the musical Hair, her Afro inspired thousands of other bushy-haired women of all races to just let it go. To forget all the muck they put on their hair -- the permanents and cream rinses and the endless chemical preparations and compressions (I slept with a headscarf on for a solid year when I was 14) and just let it be.
When I was 17, I gave up. I grew my hair out and stopped putting Dippity-do on my cowlicks and ironing my hair and having it thinned at the hairdresser's. And to my joy, it looked just fine.
Two years later, I got on a cable car in San Francisco and saw a girl I hadn't seen since high school. I recognized her right away, but also registered what I'd never before realized: how beautiful she was. Her hair was a mass of ringlets and it was as bushy and wild as mine. We both gasped and exclaimed, simultaneously: "Your hair!"
This poor girl had gone through high school with hair that looked like a mess of limp, damaged fabric. I'm betting that swimming classes worried her as much as they worried me. She'd spent untold ages straightening her hair and like mine, it just looked awful. And once she got away from high school, she did what I did: she gave up and let her hair do what it needed to do. And like me, she never looked back.
All of this -- and more -- went through my mind as I tried to talk our kid out of the car where she had installed herself with a book. She had passed on the chance to have a virtually unlimited nag-free shower because of her hair, but somehow it had managed to revert to its wavy, bushy state anyway, and she was not getting out of the car lest the good people of Ironbridge see it in all its wilful glory. Provokingly, her hair is nowhere near as bushy or cowlicky as mine was, but never mind: it was not fit for public inspection, even if those viewing it were all strangers.
Sighhhh. What's the use of acquiring all this hard-won wisdom if you can't pass it on to the younger generation?
