Hello Tallies and Curlies !
Before starting with my long curly hair story, I just wanted to say that I’ve received so many messages from so many shorties I’m amazed ! AND I want to apologize for taking so much time to answer to each message I just didn’t expect so many stories ! 😀
Meanwhile I would like to say to the shorties who took the time to send me their stories : THANKS FOR THE GOOD LAUGHS !!! Jesus !! XDDD Now 🙂
Today, to introduce the drawing I’m posting, I wanted to express my feelings about… hair. What a surprise.
Today, I would like to talk to the curly little girls’ mothers out there. Especially the straight haired mothers who, for some mysterious genetic reason or less mysterious mixed love story, ended up with a little broccoli like me.
Mothers who just can’t figure out how to take care of the jungle that’s growing on their daughters’ heads, mothers who sometimes feel like Indiana Jones trying to make their way through that jungle armed with a terrifying big brush, mothers who, from time to time, are thinking of taking out their SWORD to BRING THE JUNGLE DOWN. Well read my words mothers : STOP BEFORE YOU COMMIT A CRIME !
My mother VS my hair
As I explained it before in my about section, my mother is white. She’s partly from irish descent and didn’t bother to give me nor her straight hair nor her green eyes (what would have I done with green eyes anyway, tss).
I can imagine she already knew, by making a baby with my dear black father, that her child would maybe NOT have long silky smooth hair like she did. Yet, I don’t know why really, I do have the impression that she didn’t expect… THAT.
When I was born, I was as straight as chinese. I can picture her, kissing my little soft and almost bald head, thinking “Oooh my little sweetie, all the lovely hairdos and dresses you’re gonna get one day.” Then ? I don’t know. Maybe God thought he would make some kind of cosmic joke to my mom and decided my hair would only grow right on the middle of my head, like a curly iroquois, see ? So until I was 3, I must say I looked like a very trendy hardrocker’s baby : no hair on the sides but 3 inches of soft curls standing straight right in the middle.
My mom wasn’t that of a rocker and I guess was starting to worry about my poor little shy side’s hair, so one day she woke up with a brilliant idea : to cut it to the root, ya knooow… “to give it a little strength !”. Yeah… She thought it needed some. HA.
Well I bet she was happy when it all started to grow and to curl more and more and more and more until she had her very own little Donna Summer at home. And not mentioning that I’ve NEVER, EVER met ANYONE who has as much volume on the sides of the head as I do.
At the beginning, she wanted to understand : “What in the WORLD happened ? Is that even POSSIBLE ?? WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ??? Would YOU have some advice ????? YOU have curly hair!! ” she asked my father. “Mssss” he said.
And so she tried… no not to make it look good, no not to make it healthy, no… she simply tried to make it stay STILL. One braid, two braids, one braid, two braids, one braid… oh and also two braids. SO MANY HAIRSTYLES wooo. I bet she had twice as much fun as she thought she would have on that famous day I was born.
Me ? I didn’t care of always having the two same hairdos. I LOVED my long hair. It was part of me. I was famous at school because of my long hair. I didn’t feel proud about many things by then, but Lord was I proud of my hair.
So long long hair!
But one day, my mom well.. she got fed up.
Fed up with the hours it took to wash it, comb it, dry it, style it. Mostly she got fed up with me screaming during the whole process. So she took me to the only hair salon she knew : a regular hair salon that had never seen hair like mine before. And the dude simply cut it. Please refer to my about section if you ever want to see the before/after pictures of that sad sad day.
Well what I have to say, mothers, is that since then, my hair has always been a problem in my life. Not mentioning that I instantly started being bullied at school and that the jokes about my now short curly hair became the glasses through which I was looking at myself, my mother decided to keep it short until I was old enough to make my own decisions (around 26 years old) (haha) so when I was a teenager and it was time to just do what I wanted to do with my hair 1) it was short and ugly 2) I had simply NO CLUE about how to take care of it.
SO, after a few years simply looking like sh*t, I discovered STRAIGHTENING, and then RELAXING, and my hair NEVER GREW and I was SAD and I felt BAD about myself. Until today, I’m still literally obsessed with long hair. The thing is, it took me so much time to stop torturing my hair, the longest I’ve ever got still isn’t long enough for me, and I might turn 40,50,60 before I get the length I want and so then I can finally look like an old witch.
All of this to say:
Straight haired mothers : today you have no excuses. So do something for your daughter’s present AND future : learn about their hair!
Go fetch information about curly/kinky/coily hair anywhere you can. You can go to a black hair salon and ask questions, there are even some books about it, and there is INTERNET. YOUTUBE will show you the way. And well… yes. It does take more time than if your daughter had straight hair, but there’s nothing spiritual to say about it but this : you have no choice 😉
So ! No comic today but a drawing I did in Photoshop that took me forEVER because of the mane 🙂 I named it “Good morning Kitty !” and it’s a tribute to the long-curly-healthy-haired little girl I could have been… and still am deep in my heart 😉 (click on image to see full size)
You can buy the “Good morning Kitty” drawing on different items (poster, notebook, postcard, lunch box, clock…) in my Zazzle store 😉 
Also, Nik from Long Hair Dont Care LLC has two daughters. Believe me, you WANT to see their hair and you want to know how she did it. Well she explains all of it on her Youtube Channel (and tons of other things any mother on Earth will love to hear about!)
My mother has the thinist straightest brownest hair in existence she is a saphardic (sothern euopean jew) jew my father is an Ashkenazic one with thick curly black hair hes kelpt short his whole life. I am a tall blonde (I have albinidim) and curly. My mother has curl envy for years she wished and asked and prayed for curly hair. As a really little kid I had straight hair but some time when I was 8 it reveled the beast. My (curly) older sister loved doing hair and back when I was straight haired she would try to sit my adhd self on the floor and do some of the prettiest hair possible, I dispised it. My mom worked so was never there in the acual hair care prossece and was 0 use. I was told to brush it and to lie on it at night, once a month she would sit me dont and try to get rid of the birds nest on my head. It hurt, I cryed, it was broken and dry, knotty and was nearly all frizz. Ever six months I got a hair cut not because I needed it because it would be straight for a few hours and me and my mom liked that. I was told to take care of it but not how I was told I didnt take care of it.For all of 5th grade I wore a beenie to hide it. I tryed cocnut oil and drying it in braids. All this time I didnt think I had curls so I never looked into it. Then one day at 1am I came across an article by a curly jewish hair dresser. I had figared it out I had curly hair and I didnt know it. I cryed at one am that night for the years of my childhood with out it. The next day I finally let older curly sister of mine wash and style my hair I had not wanted her to touch it all those years because of my subborness and hatred of all those hours being her hair style ginnie pig. .From then on I took control of my hair I learned how to talk care of it long exseding the knowlge of my sister (my parents were a little disappointed about the price of my products). My mother curl envy still exists and she is constantly trying to touch it she is still jelous of my curls and I asked her to stop asking saying she wants curly hair because of the pain it put me through when I didnt know how to take care of it. It is a piece of me it i like to say its an extension of my soul. It is wild and stubborn it has a bit of ego in its volume (in hair and sound terms) it needs a bit of time and taking care of and overall it’s a lot like me.
You comics help with the fact that I am not alone.
Thank you
this is so sooooo true, and the same thing with me .
Just lucky for me my dad has the straight hair and my mom the “jungle” 😀 :D. i remember one time my mom went overseas, and my dad tried to brush my hair for school, that was the first day i ever did my hair, it was really funny how he tried to pin it up. so i was like its k and i took the brush, went to school looking like a gorilla XD.
Also i used to go on badly too when my mom combed my hair when i was younger so she took me to this hair dresser to comb it and the darn stinky woman cut my hair it never evened back .
Well. this is a great segue into a subject about biracial hair and the expectation of white women. I have met many. Many. Who tell me how they want babies by black men so that they can get pale, or caramel babies with large coils of hair. This is an EXPECTATION of many white women. When that does not happen and they get a more tightly coiled hair baby –things often get ugly.
This is no lie and has happened many times–I walked through the store with either of my 2 daughters (also bi racial) and am stopped by a perplexed or almost angry white woman who wants to know. No. Wait. DEMANDS I share how/why my daughter’s have bone, straight silky hair. what chemicals do I use, what relaxer? What magic bullet–after all–I am a black woman and they are–well they look Indian or something. First they want to know if I am their biological mother (one does not look anything like me) once that is out of the way, they want to know my secret–the lament their daughters coils or kinks and say (in front of the child) that “they don’t understand what happened–after all they are white–and they have straight hair–how can I produce girls with straight hair and one with a dad who is not white? HOW?
These women are angry and disilllusioned one even punctuated her frustration by yanking on her daughter’s hair in the cart and proclaiming she was not equipped to deal with “this mess”. I imagine that little girl had a very interesting child hood.
Women, no matter what race–do not have babies outside of your race with looks expectations for babies and white women–the idea that you are going to get a certain look in a baby is a MYTH. there is no magic bullet or panacea or special dispensation for white features or skin.
The simple truth is that my children all had waist length hair that was silky and straight due to genetics–it all is a crap shoot. I had waist length frizzy hair as a child and my daughters have waist to butt length hair also. My great grandmother was Cherokee (clue right there) That fact combined with a gene pool that includes French, Scottish and English as well as African and you still get a crap shoot.
it is a good idea to know that a baby can have any combination of genetics dating back HUNDREDS of years. There are no guarantee–but what SHOULD be a guarantee is that no matter frizzy, or coiled or silky straight or tightly wound, all little girls need validation and acceptance of their skin color, lip shape, hair texture, voice timbre, EVERYTHING And moms need to provide that. We don’t order kids like you order fries and a shake–they are precious and yes I did tell the ladies who asked me that I did nothing to my daughters except love and accept them as they are–hair and all–which was NOT what they wanted to hear.
I also told those women (because I am outspoken like that) that what their daughters looked like was a combination of them and the father–then they told me about their friends’ babies. irrelevant. Their babies are the combination of their genetics and the black man they chose–not their friend and their choice. so then the question was–“so if I get with another black man it can turn out better? There are no guarantees–but if children are made just for looks–maybe that’s the problem right there. Mom’s don’t cut your daughter’s hair off or lament over her coils and curls–VALIDATE her–if you can’t–then who will? Moms can either build or begin the destruction of their daughter’s self esteem and making babies for “looks or features” is an ugly game.
I lived the same thing… Exactly the same…. And i wanna cry when i think about it….. I forgive my mom of course but damn… it was a real hard time for me 🙁
Great post. Another very good blog for good information on afro or curly hair maintenance for curly little girls is beadsbraidsbeyond.blogspot.com and also I would so love to see you get featured on urbanbushbabes.com it would be like a merge of my favorite bloggers and we could finally get to see what you look like in real life or not 😉
Nik on YouTube told me about you’re blog. She said it was funny entertaining and different from all the other blogs out there. She was right. Totally hooked!
😀 <3
i was watching this show the tyra show it was an episode and this girl they shows third she ws biracial had curly hair and her mom always made her straigten her hair and also she had a bf and he didn’t know she had curly hair cuz she would spend hrs just straigtening her hair in the bathroom well he knew her her was curly but he never saw it she was so so ashamed of her hair her mother said she wished she didn’t have a nappy haired child o she always made her straighten her hair and she still did while she was an adult but then she stopped when she arrived at the show the curly haired stylist just told her what to do and how to take care of it this just shows tht we should just love our selves