Day 1

Well this is my first official blog! I will start off by saying I think this will be a great stress reliever for me to begin purging all these feelings I have floating inside my head regarding my hair. As a child I would run around with towels on my head dreaming of having "good" hair and feeling inferior because I didn't have it. All my dolls were white and I dreamed of having little girls with long "good" hair. By the time I was 9 years old my mother got tired of pressing, washing, and combing my natural hair so in came the good ole PCJ. I couldn't have been happier! My naturally thick coarse hair was now bone straight and I could do it myself!!! That was the beginning of my addiction to overprocessing my hair, breakage, and thinning. Oh the glory days right? Ha! Of course I also contributed none of these hair issues to the creamy crack I was putting on my hair every 4-6 weeks!

Anyway... I had always envied the gorgeous natural styles I would see black women wear and I had always wanted to try it out. I would begin growing out my perm only to fall back into old habits when the new growth made styling difficult. So went my entire 20's.

The summer before I turned 30. I decided to just do it. I went to my husbands cousin two days after the forth of July and had her cut off all my perm. Just like that! It was gone. I felt fantastic!  My last child was a girl and she really inspired me to do my big chop. She's three and of course she is natural. After combing and styling her hair for three years I came to envy my own child's head of natural hair. It was so gorgeous! I wanted hair just like it. I wondered why anyone would slap a perm on something so beautiful? I felt like a traitor as my daughter would sit on the toilet in the bathroom and watch me apply perm to my hair to make it straight when she was sitting there with hair that I thought was so gorgeous. "Would she want to perm her hair because I permed mine?" I wondered as I applied my perm. Of course she would I thought. So yes I made that leap for myself and for my daughter who I hoped would grow up and never put a towel on her head and wish she were anything other than what she was. A gorgeous chocolate colored African American princess.

The bliss from my BC didn't last long. Those hair styles that I seen that were so cute on youtube and the natural women on the street, even my own precious daughter did not have the hair texture that I have. I am what others on youtube call 4C. My child is a 4a/b with curl definition everywhere. I wanted to embrace my texture which is the whole point of going natural but I had no practice in caring for this type of hair. I had been burning it into submission for the past 20 years. I had no clue how to care for my hair...so what did I do??? Bring on the braids! I hid my hair under braids for several months. Then I came to the realization that all things take time. I needed to establish a relationship with my hair and I set off to do just that. We are coming along. I don't hide my hair anymore and I am proud of that. I am pretty confident that I am going to get Sisterlocks as soon as I can afford it and I can't wait to start that journey as well. Wish me luck. Blog you later!

Biijii