A Darn Cute Little Guy

Yehva has been asking for a haircut for weeks, and I've been sort of putting her off, not sure whether it would be a good idea. Yesterday I finally promised I would cut her hair, so I spent some time googling around for instructions on cutting an afro, and watched a couple of videos of little boys having their hair cut (from which I learned that some black boys wear their hair in braids until they get their first haircut at about 4. Who knew? Probably lots of people who aren't me. Some of those kids had amazingly long hair--Yehva's must be kind of on the slow side, growth-wise).

And this morning I got out the clippers, chose the second-longest blade guide, and buzzed it all over.

It looks a little uneven in places, but I think it's hard to tell for sure until we wash it and comb it out. I warned her we might have to do a touch-up in a couple of days. And I wish she had let me trim it a bit shorter over her ears and at the nape of her neck, but she says she likes it as it is.

Many thoughts and feelings arise.

I wrote a few months ago about thinking about cutting her hair because my health problems were making it hard for me to keep up with it, and the extremely negative reactions I got when I went looking for advice on how to do it. I can't pretend not to feel that pressure to keep her hair long. Especially because I find myself worrying that people who see her will think I'm a clueless white mother who doesn't know anything about the importance of hair in Black culture and couldn't be bothered to learn to care for my black daughter's hair.

On the other hand, as a parent I've always had a philosophy about my kids' hair that goes like this: It's only hair. They can do anything they want with it. I think parent/child fights about hair are about the stupidest fights parents choose to have with their kids, and I'm not looking for any extra or unnecessary conflicts. So, when it switched from being about me and my energy level to being about Yehva's wishes for her hair, and when her desire to have her hair cut persisted over a number of weeks, I thought I had to respect that, as I have respected it for the boys, or I'd be a rotten hypocrite. "White boys get to do whatever they want with their hair," I'd be telling her, "but you don't because you're a girl, and you're black. So even if you hate having it long, and it hurts to have it combed out, well, that's the price you have to pay."

Another piece is that a lot of people tell me Yehva is beautiful. I've always thought so, but I'm the mom and hardly objective. But people say things to me like, "She's the most beautiful little girl I've ever seen." I posted some new pictures on Facebook, and a friend commented on one picture, "Holy smokes, that kid is model-gorgeous!" (It was an especially good picture.) I feel surprisingly ambivalent about the prospect of her being beautiful; on the one hand, I like to look at beautiful people; on the other hand, I think being beautiful may be hard for women in certain ways. I've heard beautiful women talk about not being taken seriously, about not having their other qualities being appreciated. Some friends in my Quaker meeting have an adult son who is unusually beautiful and has been since childhood, and his mother has told me that one way it has been a problem is that people let him get away with things. So, in my usual way, I have fretted some about how to help her know she's beautiful without being over-invested in it; I've hoped that I and other people will also help her see her many other qualities; I've appreciated her beauty, and enjoyed the attention and praise she has always gotten for it, and yet I have seen it as a minefield as well.

And yet, in cutting her hair, one of my fears was that she would no longer be beautiful, or that people would no longer be able to see her beauty. I shouldn't worry; she always wears jeans, and old t-shirts of her brothers' (I gave away all her pink t-shirts with flowers on them earlier this summer because they were just taking up drawer space). Even with her hair in braids or puffs, she is often mistaken for a boy, so with short hair, I suppose I shouldn't worry that people will judge me for cutting her hair or no longer see her as beautiful; they're not going to see her at all. Everyone is going to think she's a darn cute little guy.

The Great Hair Blasphemy

Because I'm still struggling with pain and fatigue, I'm behind on a lot of things and just not doing a whole bunch of other things. One thing I am perpetually behind on is caring for Yehva's hair. Her hair is very thick and curly (at least it seems thick to me) and the best way to manage it is to put it in braids or twists after washing it. She doesn't like having it washed, even when we use the minimal-rinsing-required No Poo method, and once it's washed, she's pretty well done having it touched. So we are falling into a bad cycle in which her hair gets washed but not styled and devolves into a crazy textured Buckwheat-style sad linty mess; or I do manage to braid or twist it, but the style gets left in too long and taking it out becomes a whole time-consuming ordeal in itself, which just reinforces for Yehva that having her hair touched is a big pain, both literally and figuratively.

David and I have thought seriously about starting locks, in part because her hair seems to want to lock so very badly, but every time I get close to doing it, I lose my nerve. I'm not patient or especially dextrous, and I'm worried about starting them badly. "It's only hair!" David says, but I'm not sure there is any such thing as "only hair" where little black girls are concerned. And locks need to be maintained, too.

The author of my favorite book on black hair care blogged awhile ago about having to shave her daughter's head because of head lice (something I hadn't thought of: those nit-combs will not go through most African-American hair); she and her daughter both cried about it, but she ended up thinking her daughter looked really adorable with a TWA, or "teeny-weeny afro." And it made me think that Yehva, with her very elegantly-shaped head, would also look adorable with a TWA.

But you don't cut a little black girl's hair. Culturally, it's just not done. I was interested in the comments on Cherie's blog post about the lengths other Black moms had gone to not to cut their daughters' hair when they came home from school with lice. When I asked on the Adoption Hair and Skin Care Yahoo group about doing a short cut for Yehva, I only got a handful of replies--and they all told me not to do it. One woman said she's taught for 17 years in a predominantly Black school and has never seen a little black girl with short hair. Other people suggested that if I couldn't come up with a better plan, I either pay someone to braid Yehva's hair, or get one of my friends to learn how to do it (I am sure I have many friends who would love to give up their Saturday afternoons to come to my house and do Yehva's hair). In googling around, I found one website (warning: auto-play sound) with this question and answer:

My child's hair is so thick, very, very tight kinks, and it is always a battle to comb it. Should I cut it in a cute, short style?

And the answer is:

NO, DON'T CUT IT, if you do she'll be considered ugly and you a bad parent by all the African-American adults and many of the AA children you meet!

I'm not sure why not cutting black girls' hair is so important, culturally. But it does seem to be. Moreso than for little white girls, although as I've been thinking about this today I've been reflecting on the fact that I don't know a single young white girl with short hair, either. Chin-length pageboys and blunt cuts abound, but I don't know a single white girl with hair cut above her ears, for instance. No pixie cuts in this generation. So there's a girl thing there that is separate from the black thing, but I think the black thing goes deeper than the girl thing.

I honestly don't know what to make of it, for me and Yehva. On the one hand, I think I do get the cultural stuff. I mean, I don't fully get all the reasons behind the specific taboo about cutting girls' hair, but I do get that this really matters to black people, and I respect that. On the other hand, I think people should do whatever they want with their own hair. And, as I said in a discussion about this on my Facebook page, "Yehva hates having her hair washed and cries the whole time; short hair would not only be easier for me until I feel better, but it would be way easier on her. Who am I supposed to respect more, my own child or 'black culture'? Am I supposed to torture her in service to some cultural ideal?"

To complicate things for us, I cannot use any scented products. As far as I've been able to find, there are no unscented or fragrance-free product lines for African-American hair; this means that what I use on Yehva's hair is the same fragrance-free conditioner I use, which may not be right for her hair, and whatever I can cobble together from my kitchen: coconut oil, my own mix of leave-in conditioner made with water and olive oil. I don't know for sure because I can't try them, but I am told that products like the Carol's Daughter line make managing thick, nappy hair like Yehva's much easier. But we can't use them.

(This also makes the suggestions I've gotten to have her hair done at a salon not very useful; not only can it cost $70 and up to have hair braided, but hair salons are like Stinking Pits of Death for me.)

I'm not sure what my point is. Except that one reality of adopting a black baby girl is that a seemingly simple thing like, "Maybe it would be better for her to have a short haircut until I'm back on my feet" is not simple at all. It's tremendously fraught. As I jokingly said to David, "I am not allowed to cut Yehva's hair. All The Black People In America say so."

So Far, So Good

At the Friends for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Concerns Midwinter Gathering last weekend, I got to talk briefly with two friends who are also white parents of black children, though both of them have children much older than mine. One thing we talked about was the reaction of black people in public places to our having black children.

This is something I've heard a lot of stories about, about strange black people saying negative things to white parents. All three of us had heard the stories. But none of us had experienced it.

In my experience, black people either ignore us, or, if they're baby-lovers, admire and chat with Yehva without necessarily saying much to me, maybe tossing a "she's cute!" or "have a good day!" at me as they move on. This is comparable to how white people treat us in public.

Once in a restaurant, two black women took a picture of baby Yehva because they thought their mother would want to see how cute she was.

I've never had a black person comment on how well--or poorly--I've done Yehva's hair.

I got the most direct commentary from black women at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival last year. One woman spent most of a shuttle ride giving me unsolicited advice about how to care for Yehva's hair; I knew most of it already because there are a lot of resources for adoptive parents these days, including my favorite e-book, Her Special Hair, written by a black woman specifically for white parents who might not have experience with black hair at all.

At the same time, I appreciated this woman taking the time to talk to me about hair care, especially since she did it in a very friendly and non-judgmental way. My friend Ahavia was saying that there just weren't the resources available when she first took custody of her daughter, or when she was doing foster care. She didn't even know what "ashy" meant, she said, or how to plait hair! A bus ride with a friendly, informative black woman would probably have been very welcome to her.

This same woman ended our shuttle ride by taking me aside for a big squeezy hug and saying, "Thank you for loving her." Which is a crazy thing to be thanked for. "As if I could help myself," I said back, but I know she didn't just mean love. She meant care for, I think, in all the meanings of that phrase.

She hadn't asked me anything about how Yehva came to us, and didn't know any of the story or the situation of Yehva's birthparents. So I know she wasn't judging our specific situation relative to where Yehva would have been if her birthmother hadn't placed her for adoption. But it also seemed to me that she thought of Yehva as belonging in part to her; this is why she could thank me for my love of Yehva, because her own concern and caring for a little black girl made her grateful to see that girl being loved. She felt she had a stake in Yehva's well-being (and in the condition of her hair).

That hug meant a lot to me. I think that, even if I sometimes get negative reactions from some black people, that hug will help me deal with them more lovingly. Because I think the negative reactions and the hug come from the same place: the concern that black people have for the community's children, and for the well-being of the whole community; the hope that they have for strength, wholeness, happy lives.

If one black person looks at us and says, "Thank God that little girl found her way to a loving mother in a healthy family," and another one looks at us and says, "That is an example of how the black community is weakened by the adoptions of children of color by white families," they're both expressing the same care and concern, for Yehva, for all black children, for black communities.

And, you know, I think they're both right. I am glad Yehva found her way to us, both for her sake and ours. But I would be glad to see the black community in Chicago--where Yehva was born--so strong and functional that every child born there was already in a loving, healthy family.