Moms and Daughters Bond Over Hair

Photo from Essence.com

Moms and daughters often have a special bond. It is usually an unspoken thing that is cultivated and nurtured through times spent together talking, shopping, cooking, etc. One of the most universal activities moms and daughters engage in is the ritual of doing hair.

I can vividly remember back to my first house as a child, where my mom would sit me down on the floor between her legs before work to do my hair. She would wet it with water from a spray bottle and apply some kind of grease, brushing it up into ponytails that she would plait or twist. In every picture I have from my childhood, I notice my cutely coordinated outfits and tiny shoes. But most of all, I can't help but to notice how fresh and neat my hair always looked. My mom would spend a great deal of time and patience parting and braiding, adding barettes and bows to make my hair look cared for and loved.

The Washington Post beautifully captures the intimacy of the mom and daughter hair ritual in their piece by Lonnae O'Neal Parker entitled Balm: By styling her daughters' hair each morning, she was attending to something deeper than a beauty ritual. The piece is one mother's reflection on the experience of sharing time with her daughter during their daily grooming practice. She even reflects back on her experience as a child, getting her hair done by her mother before work.

One passage really struck a chord and brought to mind what it used to be like for my mom and me as we struggled through my massive bunch of kinky coily locks in the mornings before school and work.

My mother, a Chicago schoolteacher for 33 years, combed my hair and my sister's hair for 35 minutes every morning in her slip so as not to get hair grease on her work clothes. She reminds me of how much those mornings used to hurt. "You'd want to turn around and look at me with all this woe on your face so that maybe I would stop," Momma remembers. "But, you know, I couldn't stop, because you had to have your hair combed." And she had to get to work. And every two weeks, when she washed my hair, "it would be all over your head, like you had an afro the size of a small umbrella and that had to be pulled back down in something I could reasonably deal with."

The piece is accompanied by some lovely images that sweetly capture the essence of this bonding experience.

The article is touching and I am sure most of you will find some part of yourself in it. Read it and come back to let me know your memories of getting your hair done by mom (or whoever raised you).