If you grew up with a Mom or Grandma that French braided your hair, you know what it means for your hair to hurt. That pinching pain that pulled my scalp so tight I had a 6 year old face-lift was always a sign that I had had a great day, even if it did give me pulsing headaches that only were relieved by unleashing a mane of frizz before bed. I was always sad when that moment came to unglue my strands from one another and allow the body in my hair to bounce into its fullest form because it was a shedding of a moment that had been my most favorite of all.
To this day I can smell the chemical fragrance of LA Looks green gel as she plopped it in her hands and ran it through the length of my hair. That gentle contact alone was comforting in a way I have found nowhere else in my life. She used a lot of that goop because if she didn't it apparently wouldn't hold all day. Believe you me, with that amount of gel in my hair it would have held independently for days- but I never said anything because I liked how it smelled and how it felt crunchy when it dried.
She used a comb to part my thick brown locks down the middle and secured the side she wasn't working on with a hair tie. I always had to take a deep breath when she started to braid and on several occasions pushed back tears from the pain. It hurt so badly, but it was done with love and I just couldn't bare the thought of hurting her feelings if I spoke up. So I sucked it up when she snagged a few strands with the pintail comb and tried to distract myself by engaging her in conversation.
Usually I asked her to tell me stories about my Mom when she was young. I would giggle as she would tell me about my Mom's quirks and sustain respectful silence when she would reminisce on family members we had lost, especially my uncle who was in his early 20's at the time of his death only a couple years before. Sometimes we watched figure skating on her small living room TV as I sat on a chair and she stood above me, gazing up to see Michelle Kwan do a double luxe. We loved our skating videos and they were almost always integrated into our visits. When Grandma was braiding my hair and there was poetry being lived out in fluid motion before us on the TV nothing could ruin it.
Usually a few days would pass before she snapped the hair tie into place on the first braid and she would begin on the other side (at least it felt that long to my younger self). The moment she was done was always one of relief and sadness. I was so glad the pain of her pulling my hair into a triple stranded ‘do was over, but I immediately craved the soothing sensation of her wrist resting gently on my crown as she moved. Our braiding routine was one of such simplicity. Yet, it has stuck with me after all of these years as one of the most pure and enjoyable rituals of my young childhood.
A child with a tender head, it always drove my Mom crazy that not only did I tolerate Grandma fixing my hair but I begged her to do it- because I squawked like a banshee anytime Mom came near me with a comb. Although Mom always had a more soft touch than her own mother, there was something irreplaceable about our sacred hairdo moments. Those days are stuck in my heart like a set of twin French braids so weighed down with LA Looks that no hands in the world are strong enough to break them.
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