Hair Article of the Day

Am I obsessed with Malia Obama's hair? You might think so from the links around here. But hey, I just started trying to master two-strand twists, and she's my inspiration!

"Twist and Shout: Why Malia's Hair Speaks to Me"
by Nikita Stewart at The Root

Our Hair Routine

After my recent hair post Porter asked for the rundown on the how and when of doing Anna's hair. So hair's my report on how we do things around hair. (With a strong punny accent. Sorry.)

I'm pretty much a once-a-week bath-giver. I could claim this is because I heard too much soap and water can dry out her skin and hair, but let's review my motto: above all, I'm lazy. And besides, the dog washes her on average twelve times a day.

I usually use Pantene for Women of Color conditioner. Occasionally I'll use a natural jojoba shampoo I got from Northern Essence (they also have great diaper rash cream safe for cloth diapers and an amazing orange cream lip butter) and/or an Herbal Essences conditioner for curly hair that some random lady in Target told me to get. I prefer the Pantene, though.

Here is her hair shortly after a bath. MUST. SQUEEZE. CURLS.


Here it is later the same day. As you can see, her afro is much bigger than her baby's.


I usually don't put in any leave-in conditioner because it seems like it would build up, although I have used natural oils. But would some product help keep her curls detangled and un-frizzed longer? I may try some Curly Qs hair milk as some of you recommended. But for now I usually let her go the day of her bath with her hair loose and by the time I comb it all out, it's tangled enough that we'd both prefer I not do that every day.

I usually do her hair in the morning when I'm doing a diaper change/getting her dressed. I have her sit on the changing pad facing away from me—it's on a semi-low chest thing so she's sitting around my waist level, looking out the window. I put about five thousand books and things up there for her to play with. They are never enough.

To wet her hair to comb through I have a spray bottle filled with water, light olive oil, a couple drops tea tree oil. I know the olive oil seems weird but it seems to work and be cheaper and less buildup than trying to wet all that hair with a product. It just sucks the moisture so I use a lot, so it seems like I'd go through a lot of detangler-type product—wouldn't I? What do you all use?

I have also used virgin unrefined coconut oil. It's nice because you can use it on hair, scalp, and skin and it's safe for cloth diapers. And it makes her smell like a macaroon.

Mmmmm . . . macaroons . . . What? Oh yes, hair.

Once I have her hair combed out with a wide-tooth comb I start parting with a finer comb and the rat-tail end of it. Be thankful this is not a video or you would fast-forward: I am slow. But getting better. It's actually easier with slightly longer hair. If necessary I'll use alligator clips to hold sections of hair until I get them in puffs/ponytails. I will sometimes spray a leave-in conditioner on the puffs and the part that's left free in back.

I know. I said I don't use a leave-in. Except when I do. I'm a rebel against my own cause.

By now she'll have launched all the books across the room, dropped the combs into the black hole behind the changing table, drooled all over the hair clips, and started shaking her head no no no no no no until she's dizzy—we're pretty much done. On the rare occasion she's up for a little more sitting, I may braid the puffs. Often I'll leave puffs for one day and the next day I just have to comb the back and redo the puffs, which makes it more likely she'll sit long enough for me to braid them.

This is the beauty of having her hair styled: it's much easier to spruce up quickly. Which helps me get out of the house with her in less than the 2.75 hours it seems to take these days. And I am fairly obsessive about her hair looking good in public—I don't want to be that mom with the unkempt child, especially an unkempt black child, and especially especially white mom with unkempt black child. We all have bad hair days, but I'm too aware of how much attention is paid to my child and how people might judge her if her hair looks out of control, unfortunately all the more so for a minority child.

Also, I have a raging ego that feels sad when I appear incompetent and happy when complimented. There, I said it. Now you confess something.

Please leave a comment with your hair product, styling, and maintenance tips! (Especially if you think I could clearly really, really use them . . .) As your reward for reading this ridiculously long post and its excruciating detail useful only for my husband's reference in case of my untimely death (I'll file it with the insurance policy, honey), here is a photo of Anna whining. Yes, Mom, she really does.

Nooooooo more hairdoing!

This Little Piggy . . .

. . . is also cute in a headband!

A note from little Cindy Lou Who's mother: Please don't look too closely at this little piggy's parts. All this hair experimentation is still very much in beta testing around here.

The Privilege of Hair Space

Seinfeld of the day: "Should we be talking about this?"

Perhaps you were wondering where I was going with this baby-touching post. I hope I can throw some thoughts out without sounding too nutters. I may need my favorite college soc major to help me out.

As y'all noted, people like to touch babies, even if they don't know them. That's understandable to some extent, depending on the situation.

The skin thing I can let go because it's usually just a hand, which baby herself reaches out or could pull away, and it's usually baby-loving adults talking about how soft baby skin always is. If someone seems amazed at the softness I just smile and with my best Queer Eye for the Straight Guy voice say, "Moisturize, moisturize, moisturize!"

But I have really been noticing the head-touching lately and it's starting to bother me. It's just really, really too much like petting sometimes. I love her curls too, but she's not a poodle, people.

I let a lot of things go because it's teenagers who are the most frequent offenders--probably 75 percent--and I know they just plain don't have much sense of certain social graces like personal space and baby boundaries. Let alone, here where we live, extra sensitivity to how it might look and feel for them to be so grabby with the only black child in sight or the knowledge that just because she's black doesn't mean she'll grow the kind of massive disco-funk afro they think would be flippin' sweet.

And now I think that's exactly why I need to not let it go so much: lest they think it's okay to touch a black baby's (or any baby's, actually) head without hesitation or asking, and so think it's okay to touch a black three-year-old's head/hair any old time, without asking. And then a ten-year-old's hair. And a fourteen-year-old's hair. And then that poor only black girl on her dorm floor's hair (because I recall this interview I did at my 90% white college with the school's minority student representative and how she mentioned how while the black students were all for talking openly about race, it gets awful tiresome to have everyone wanting to feel your hair all the time). And God forbid they develop some kind of embarrassing Barbara Walters pawing compulsion. Newsflash: Black people don't like random people touching their heads. (Also, this just in, parents don't like random people touching their babies!)

So why did I ask this on MLK Day? Well, first of all, it was just on my mind because I'd noticed a lot of head-patting on our last outings (and yes, it's starting to mess up her hair), and I was wondering how to politely discourage this. Then I wondered how other parents deal with this and realized that it probably wasn't a major concern for most of my white friends with white babies. Of course, as your comments noted, we all deal with the touching to some extent, because people just can't seem to keep their hands off of babies. But I'm telling you, it's like her hair is magnetized for some people. And here, I think, is the important difference: If your child is white, you never have to wonder if people are touching her because she's black. (You also don't get hair care questions or all those afro jokes.)

When you don't have to think about a problem that other people have to deal with, that's called a privilege. In this case, an example of white privilege. I'm not mad about it or anything; obviously we signed up for this, and it's more of an observation than a problem at this point. I'm just a sociology nerd who found it interesting that while some people would say this privilege doesn't even exist, here I'd found an example to add to my personal list (right after inability to purchase inconspicuous Band-Aids).

Maybe you think I'm thinking too much about this. Maybe you're thinking, as Peggy McIntosh puts it, "my chief worries about [my white children] do not concern others' attitudes toward their race." But that's my point: they don't have to if your child's in the majority. I'm just saying that if you've never thought about how people react to your child's race at all--never wondered how to keep well-meaning curiosity from one day turning into a lot of burden for a little girl to bear--well, isn't it a privilege that you don't have to worry about that on top of all the other worries about creepy grabby people in general and plastics leeching into food and the icecaps melting and yada yada yada?

All I can tell you is that from my observation, people touch my girl's hair a lot. So the next question is, how do I reverse this trend? I think my new rule might be if you're not holding her, don't touch her (head). If she reaches her hand out to touch you, that's different, of course. But I've never once seen her thrust her head at someone. And I'm just sayin', there's a difference between needing one of these:
and also needing one of these:


We'll take one of each, please!



Postscript disclaimer: If you're a friend or relative reading this, don't worry, I probably don't mind you touching my baby.

My MLK Day Survey

On this MLK Day, I have some questions for all you parents out there. I need your input, so please comment here or email me. The question of the day is . . .

When you are (or were) out and about with your baby (or one-year-old and beyond), do people touch your baby? And more specifically, do they touch your baby's head?

And on a related note, how about stroking your baby's skin, such as on the arm, and admiring its softness?

Finally, for, uh, statistical purposes . . . what is your baby's race and what is yours?

I am thinking here not of people you are close to, who would be holding and playing with your baby, but acquaintances and even strangers who would approach while you're holding or standing/sitting with your child.

Hit me with your experiences and then I'll hit you with my thoughts. Thanks.


Meanwhile, unity is the great need of the hour.

Uh huh, pretty soon I am going to need one of these.

For a Girl Like Mine, No Matter How Beautiful

In a recent New York Times article, one brave white dad recounts his triumphs over the whole new world of black girl’s hair care here: “I Have Taken On My Daughter’s Hair and Won.”

Somehow I suspect that in this household, the handling of hair will fall to me—especially in the case of a girl’s hair. I have only the most negligible skills in brushing, braiding, parting, and prettying (see: my head, circa 1985–2007). I will even confess that many years ago when adopting a black child was only the most abstract of concepts for us, my husband pointed out the different hair and skin care needs of black children, and I pooh-poohed it. Isn’t that a paranoid stereotype? How different could it be? “Of all the things I don’t know about taking care of a baby,” I said, “that is way down the list of things I’m worried about!”

In a sense this is still true: I still have many more basic and urgent things to learn about caring for a baby! However, this is no longer way down my list of concerns. In fact, it’s been high enough on the list that I’ve actually learned a good deal already—chiefly, the importance that I keep learning. As white adoptive parents we hear over and over that hair is important in the African-American community—for a variety of cultural reasons—and that we must keep our children looking good and feeling that their hair and skin are beautiful. We fear the unsolicited scrutiny and hands on our children’s hair even as we secretly seek the ultimate stamp of approval: compliments from black women. We wonder if we will learn to braid and twist and cornrow well enough; we wonder how to tell her that the amount of kinkiness her hair has is just enough; and in a world where every girl’s sense of self is under fire, where white girls want to be tanner and black girls want to be lighter and every girl wants to be thinner or taller or sexier . . . we wonder if it will be enough.

Please watch the award-winning student film “A Girl Like Me” at the Media Matters Film Festival website. It is #2 in the boxes on the right side of the screen. (Number 1, “Slip of the Tongue,” is pretty dang good too.) And tell a girl you know she’s beautiful for something she thinks is not, for something outside of—or rather inside of—her body.

O God,
help me
to believe
the truth about myself,
no matter
how beautiful it is!

—Macrina Wiederkehr, “A Prayer to Own Your Own Beauty,” in Seasons of the Heart
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 71.