My own hair stays the same, blonde going to white, curls all over my head so that I never even need to comb my hair after a shower. My hair is the only thing that stays the same as I age.
A few decades ago we all had wild and unkempt hair. Our beautiful sons had shoulder length hair until I chopped it off. Our daughter had long blonde hair - such a trial to braid it or tame it into something manageable.
Then I came to know about black hair and all the issues with that! Straightening! Chemical doses! Can't swim! What happened to those beautiful little black girls in my class who sported lovely 'naturals'?
My favorite hair styles were those of little girls with very long hair whose moms or dads carefully braided it every day. I love the cornrows of so many black girls in my class. I love the wild curls parents allow on their boys and the straight dark falls of hair on the Asian kids.
And I especially love the longish hair on boys. I know that in the cities of this country parents prefer to have their boys wear longish hair. It is a marker of socioeconomic class. When we picked up my grandson from his (elitist!) camp last summer, I noticed that all the boys had shaggy hair. Of course these kids had been away from barbers for several weeks.
In my volunteer work with a poverty stricken stripe of rural America, I notice that hair is definitely a marker. Boys with buzz cuts or strange buzzes and long hair, sometimes dyed, always catch my attention. These kids are often the troublesome ones and I have to look at their families. (Why is their priority to have their child have a blue-tipped Mohawk hairdo?)
How people do their kids' hair tells me a lot. But, really, it's only hair.
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