When I was little, Friday evenings and Saturday mornings were spent washing and pressing hair in my house. My mother had 6 younger sisters, and she would run us through the Friday evening wash and braid, and on Saturday she would press and curl each one of us. This was a bonding experience I appreciate to this day. There was always much love and laughter in my mother's kitchen on weekends with the ladies, as long as I stayed out of "grown folks business!!"
Sometimes our hair would still be slightly damp, and I can't remember how many times I would feel steam rising from my head, or see it on my aunts. My mother had her hair done at the beauty salon, but there were just to many of us to afford that route. She would often complain to her beautician she was tired of "doing hair" every week.
When I was 13 my mother got her first relaxer. She loved the results so much she decided this was the way she would do all of our hair. My mother had long, straight hair, and I couldn't tell the difference with a relaxer, but she loved it. So her beautician bought her a giant jar of relaxer and a bottle of nuetralizing shampoo to relax all of our hair.
I was the guinea pig for this great experiment. The problem was, my mother couldn't remember if her beautician had washed her hair before he relaxed it, and she didn't want to call and ask him. She thought about it, and decided to go ahead and wash my hair first....BIG MISTAKE!!!! She had already warned me the relaxer would burn my scalp...just a little. That meant it was working. So when it started burning immediately and I began to scream she thought I was over re-acting. She finally realized it really WAS burning when hair started coming out in the comb she was applying it with. When she washed it out I had burns on my scalp serious enough that I had to go to the hospital, and most of my hair was either broken off or gone....
My reward for this torture was getting blonde streaks in what was left of my hair. That was something I had always admired on the older girls and my aunts, and yes, I was really young to have blonde streaks(at least in THOSE days), but it made all the torture of my first relaxer worth it. It was at that point I first started wearing hair pieces. Not the ones like they have now, where you can buy synthetic hair and no one can tell if it's yours or not. I mean those pieces were pure, straight, European hair, which of course would only blend with your own if it was dead straight, and then only from a distance.
By the time I was 19 I was married with two little babies. I had gotten used to using wigs and adding hair pieces to my styles. It was just something people did in those days, no big deal.
I would relax my hair, add a piece, and so the breakage and damage to my own hair didn't matter....that is on the surface. But deep down inside I would look at my hair and wonder how did this happen to me. I had a thick headful of hair when I would take care of it, but, even though I loved styling my hair, I didn't really take time and proper care of it. So I took major steps to get it in good shape, going to the beauty shop for maintaince.
I finally had happy hair, but I was still deeply attracted to wigs and pieces off and on...but then it happend...BRAIDS!!!
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