5 years of HAIR

What a huge issue hair can be for white parents and their black children. Ha! Girls really. My son has almost no interest in his hair except for when we get out the clippers and cut it—then he wants to know if he can watch the iPad. End of story.

But girls. GAWD. I can remember being a huge PIA for my Mom when she did my hair but then go and add a trauma background to being a girl and “It’s time to do your hair.” becomes, “I’m scared that this bonding time together is going to lead to feelings of trust and that can’t happen because when I trust someone they turn around and leave me. If you leave me I’ll die.”

Therefore: Hair=Death.

Another scenario can be, “It’s time to do your hair.” And the kid can think, “I’m being showered with attention and I don’t deserve it.” and they will unconsciously try to recreate the wild storm that is within them—and take you along for the ride.

That’s a whole lot of YIKES surrounding hair time isn’t it? But I'm learning! It's taken me 5 years to get to this point: understand the fear that surrounds special time with you as the parent and don't rush it. I wish I had understood this 5 years ago.

Loreli and I have had our share of YIKES in the nearly 5 years she’s been home. In the beginning it wasn’t too bad. She was used to having her hair combed and braided at the orphanage. 

When she came home we did all kinds of things, starting off with easy, pulling the front back and leaving everything else loose and curly to bantu knots, box braids, and twists.

Curly baby hair :-)

Pom-poms

Look how close in size they were! Daniel was 2.5 years old here and Loreli 4.5 years old.

Bantu knots

Box braids

Loose and darling

She started fussing a bit after the first few months. Then the fuss turned to crying which turned to screaming and crying. I finally decided that it wasn’t worth the fight and cut her hair short. And that’s the way it stayed for quite a while. There were bigger issues to deal with, hair was about last on the list.

OMG--how cute!

 

Then we started to grow it out and the screaming and crying returned but in a bigger girl’s body. She acted as if she were dying…see above. I remember three good times with her hair--dress rehearsal for a ballet show and then the actual show. The girls were supposed to wear their hair in a bun and she was excited that she could too. The third time was when we had a teenage girl from Ethiopia braid her hair.

She looks 15 here doesn't she? She was 7.

The screaming and crying turned to raging and crying so I talked to her about locs and she agreed. We went to a woman in Denver and she did fairly large two strand twists that apparently were going to turn into locs…ginormous locs. Who would want locs that big? I read and read while the twists got fuzzier by the day and when I was done I used a rug hook and locked her hair myself. Darling. She ran through our park yelling, “My hair swings now!” Yay! Success! Until I had to relock the new growth and we were back where we started. 

Locs

After a year of locs and the relocking process she decided that cutting off the locs and having hair short enough that she could do it herself was better. 

Pretty and sassy no matter what her hair is doing :-)  This was taken the day we cut her locs off. She said, "I look like myself again!"

This past year it’s been slowly growing out and she has been keeping it in a (mostly) presentable TWA (teeny weenie afro). In the beginning she would use headbands to keep it up off her forehead 

I tried my hand at face painting--what fun!

but by the middle of the school year it was getting so long that she would just plop a headband in the middle of the top of her head and that was that. I kept my mouth shut and focused on our relationship. When her hair became too unkempt, I talked of cutting it shorter so she could comb it and that had her working harder on it.

And that brings us to now. The Family Intervention Program gives me renewed hope (yet again) that I can help her with her hair. Our very first “time-in” was about her hair and how she treated me like the devil in disguise when I did it but everyone else who did her hair, she was fine with. It was time to deal with this. “You will not treat me with such disrespect when you treat everyone else like they are doing you a huge favor by doing your hair. Enough is enough.”

I started by having her hair trimmed by my hair lady. She was fine during that of course. Then doing the easy front pom-poms and leaving the back loose, like I used to in the beginning. It took no more than 15 minutes and she was able to control herself that long. Yay! My favorite was the first or second time pulling the front back she said to herself, “MUST stay calm Loreli!” She was really trying.

Then Gladys came and straightened it using a straightening comb. I had no idea that straightening combs would burn off the ends of her hair and leave them crispy and unable to curl. I’ll have to find a product that protects against high heat before we try that again. In the meantime Gladys can do twists and braids.

Wow. I had never seen her with straightened hair before!

First "straight hair" ponytail and bangs.

Yesterday: first BIG hair day for Loreli and me. I asked around, watched a bunch of youtube videos and learned how to “shingle” hair. It took me probably an hour of research, an hour to braid her hair the night before, after her shower to keep it tangle free, and an hour and a half to actually do it in the morning. It’s cute. Cuter than the always-slightly-matted-TWA she’s been wearing for a year now. I think it will be cuter when it gets a little longer.

Daniel understood what was happening, on my end anyway, and said, “Why does Loreli get to do this? It’s like a gift.”

Good Lord, my 7 year old son is learning about the gift of time. Something my 9 year old cannot figure out.

“Well Daniel, girls need to have more stuff done with their hair because it's so much longer. Now that we're doing this Family Intervention Program I can do this with Loreli’s hair when I couldn’t before. If you want I can do your hair too.”

“Okay!” and he plopped himself down in the chair next to Loreli. 

I sprayed his hair, put in a little bit of product, and worked it in. Then I told him how handsome he was, sniffed his hair, kissed his cheek, said he was yummy and he was done and off and running again.

How did Loreli do?

I saw an attitude come back today that I’ve not seen in a week. She started getting huffy with me toward the end of our shingling session. She didn’t have tangles because I had braided her hair the night before and I was only finger combing with a ton of product so she wasn’t in any pain. I spoke to her alter ego and said, “Hey Hiro, what’s going on?”

Silence.

“I’m wondering if Hiro is visiting us because this is a bonding time and that can be pretty scary.”

Silence and a grumpier face.

Sigh. I really had hoped that we could get through this without a fuss. Loreli was a grumpy, angry little girl for the next 10 minutes—no words—just moaning, groaning, sighing, slumping and sitting up over and over, working herself into what I knew was coming next—a rage. I was internally working myself up too. Suddenly I remembered the rules—boundaries! No disrespect!

“Loreli. You will stop all of this RIGHT NOW. I expect a good attitude and a happy look on your face!” Sadly, I didn’t say it in a calm voice. Boo. I have years of background to overcome too.

Loreli sat up straight and put on a strange smile. I continued to do her hair and looked at her out of the corner of my eye. She looked…self-satisfied. My little explosion was apparently just what she wanted. In typical traumatized child fashion she found a way to make her calm external world as turbulent as her interior world.

Ah well, at least it was short lived and not the raging that she used to do. Eventually the self-satisfied smile disappeared and she said softly, “Sorry Mommy.”

“Thank you Loreli.”

Off and on the rest of the day though she continued with a bit of strange attitude. She felt scared to me. There was no overt “bad” behavior, just little things like acting grumpy when asked to clean up her toys. Not eating much of her dinner, which is really rare. Nothing major really, just stuff I hadn’t seen in awhile. Thinking about it today I realize that I need to step back a bit. An hour of braiding the night before and an hour and a half in shingling was just too much for her to take at this point. It brought up too much fear for her. She handled me braiding her hair into two French braids the other day so that is probably the extent of it for right now. As she learns to trust us more then we can work into the styles that take longer.

Double French braids

Many successful hair times will slowly teach her that she’s safe and I’m not going to leave her. I need to remember clicker training dogs and horses. There is absolutely NO point in showing an animal what the end trick/result will be and expecting them to get it. I have to break it down into tiny, happy successes and that will lead to a larger success later on.

And yes, before you freak out and yell at me, I did just intentionally compare my child’s training to animal training. Dog, horse, human, we are all animals. :-)