My Way of Saying, “I’m Sorry”…

So there’s been a lot of positive feedback from my husband’s recent comments on www.alopecianmuse.com

I just had to publish his comments here (after all, he is my husband and he is talking about me).  However, if you’d like to read the blog entry that inspired these moving words please visit the above website and give a holler to Angela.  The name of the post is ‘This One is For You Men.’ His comments were as follows:

“I was referred to this post by my wife.

Even though I feel like I have a decent grasp on the subject from personal experience with her, it was good to hear another perspective.

When I met my wife she was not yet wearing a wig or hairpiece on the regular. At the time her hair was not very thick and some days depending on the style I could see more of her scalp than others through the style. Even still, thanks to working closely on the job I got to know her and, though I was attracted to her physically, it was “her” and not simply her appearance.

So yes, I was the guy that knew early in the game that the hair thing was not perfect and still pursued a relationship.

Over time, among other conversations we spoke about her hair and how it got to the point that it currently was and how she felt about it. Long story short, she was frustrated daily with styling it, the way it grew or didn’t and later ways to hide it. Then and still now she asks me various “what if I looked like…” questions that allude, but never directly to, her feelings about her appearance.

Don’t get me wrong. As a man, I think there is an amount pride that I wanted to feel when walking with his girlfriend, woman, wife, etc.. The natural tendecy is to think of your spouse as a extension/refelection of yourself.

With that said, although it did cross my mind that someone would, in her absence address the issue, I think I was more concerned with how it affected her mood, self-confidence, etc…

I think men and women are attracted to self-confidence. So it wasn’t directly the issue itself that bothered me; it was the low self-esteem that was connected to it.

I took a very difficult path as her then-boyfriend now husband. As a christian, I didn’t want to lie to her or myself. As her man, I didn’t want to make her feel worse about herself. Besides that, I knew that most of the compliments I gave her in all honesty she did not believe even if she believed I meant them.

We talked about her cutting it off and I suggested that she didn’t. Not because I didn’t want her to be bald, but because I felt it would have been a decision based on frustration.

She began wearing wigs or getting extensions and I almost never saw her hair again. It did help in public because she was more confident in her appearance. Of course, someone would ultimately compliment her ‘hair’ which would later turn into a conversation about it; for a while even in more intimate times she wore a wig. There were times I’d love to ‘run my fingers through her hair’; however, it wasn’t hers and it would have made her more self-concious as well as remind me that it wasn’t hers (especially by touch).

For a while she was focused on growing her hair while publicly wearing wigs with the hopes that it would ‘look decent’ enough to not need the wigs within a certain time frame. When she wasn’t happy with the results after some time, she cut it short.

For our wedding she got a more expensive wig, similar to those that celebrities used. Looking at the pictures, I really liked how that looked. More importanly, I believe she did too. She was almost terrified about being the center of attention for an entire evening; however, she was beautiful inside and out.

Now when we are home she ties her head up, which I actually like the way that looks. When we go out she puts on a wig. I’d like for her to be comfortable enough with me to allow me to see her hair as is. For now, if she ever needs to re-wrap her head with scarf or something, I respectfully don’t look.

The moral of the story….
I am continually sympathetic towards women and the unreasonable physical expectations placed on them by society and/or pop culture. This goes beyond just hair but into everything potentially physically ‘attractive’ about a woman literally from her hair folicles to her toenails.

Guys indirectly feel this too because there’s a tendency to want others to respect that you have a woman who’s physically ‘all that.’

I really feel that it shouldn’t matter nearly as much as it seems to and ultimately it’s the intangible things that caused me to marry her. There are plenty of attractive women that I never considered for marriage.

I tip my hat to your husband cause I know that was not a easy ride.

Love is an ability; it is not a feeling; not an attraction; not a intimate experience. However, we want all those things from our spouses. I know she wants me to love her for her (and for all of her) and not in spite of her. However, I want her to love her for her as well.”

All I have to say is back off ladies, he’s mine!

Anway, here’s where the apology part comes in.  As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been a real jerk to my husband lately and I know he’s really frustrated with me right now.  But I wanted to let him (and whoever else reads this) know that I’m sorry for that. (This is me now transitioning into speaking to him directly)  I’m working so hard on deserving every word that you wrote about me.  Anyway, I’ve been working on this tribute to you and I think now would be a good time to share it.  A lot of people tell me that I absently gaze at my ring and kind of twirl it on my finger and so I thought about the subconscious implications of that and turned it into a poem.  I hope this gives you just a glimpse of what marriage to you means to me…

 

The Ring He Gave…

The ring he gave reflects the character of light

The boisterous laugher of the bright sun

The soft sigh of the shy moon

The fractured disarray of a 60 watt bulb

Lending each stone unique favor.

It’s not the light that makes it change

But the eyes that look upon it

A gaze transformed by adversity and proven love,

Tear-stained eyes that bestow meaning on

The midnight sky blue sapphires

Guarding faithfully the center diamond.

The hand that takes this ring’s shape with each passing day,

The skin beneath it carved away like

A lover’s inscription on the trunk of a tree.

The deeply set markings seem to swear that

This hand belongs to this ring.

Reinforced each time it slides so easily into its space,

Worn away with time,

So at home, like my legs entwined with yours while we sleep.

My body, so proud to wear this ring you gave.

Blissful, regal, awakened to the knowing that

I am a wife,

I am his wife

The man who gave his heart and let me wear it on my hand.

                                                ~JP~

The Coping Mechanism…

It’s hard to describe what it’s like being 25 years old and having had to wear a wig or a weave in your head everyday since you were 23.  I HATED hair when I had it.  A bad hair day meant a bad day in general but I would kill for one of those right now.  Hair is hair; no matter how jacked up it might be there’s always something to work with.  But the lack of hair means you’re destined for imprisonment.  It means that everything you do becomes about covering up what’s no longer there and convincing yourself that you’re still the same person in spite of what you’ve lost.  I won’t insult anyone by comparing hair loss to losing a limb or a loved one…but I can honestly say that when you’re a woman, your mind can have a hard time telling the difference.

Four years after my last entry on the subject, I find myself married, halfway through medical school with the next decade or so of my life pretty well secured.  I should be on top of the world.  I should be happy that my biggest problem is my hair.  After all, I can still do all of the same things that I used to do and I still have all of the people in my life that matter to me plus a phenomenal husband and a brand new family of in-laws, not to mention the whole rest of my life to look forward to.  But I’m not the same.  After going through two bouts of cutting my hair off so that it could grow back healthy I found that this last time around, some if it simply refused to grow at all.  I remember waiting, like some parched desert animal in the middle of a drought for those thirst-quenching droplets of reassurance to hit my skin.  But my earth remained dry.  And so, I did the only sensible thing a proud, stubborn woman of good breeding and education could do…I went into complete denial.  Judge me if you want, but no situation becomes as real as when your knee deep in it trying to figure out how you managed to land in quicksand while you were headed for the oasis.  It’s the easiest thing in the world to stand on solid ground and tell that helpless, sinking fool to stop struggling so they can float to the top.  But mark my words, you fall in with that idiot, you’ll be clamoring onto those shoulders to get yourself out first.  Fear makes you crazy.  It cancels out your ability to reason and retrieve basic knowledge so you end up acting just as crazy as every idiot you’ve ever criticized.  So be careful.

 A person will do whatever they can to cope with something that their mind continues to reject, logical or not, so long as it works.  If you’re like me, you’ll tell yourself that it’s cosmetic and to care about it too much is vain and selfish.  You’ll deny that there’s a problem, refuse to talk about with the people who care about you and are concerned, and allow it to silently cripple your life into something that you no longer recognize.  What I found out the hard way was that rooted in each hair follicle was not only my confidence in my physical appearance, but also my confidence in everything else.  With each hair shaft that refused to grow, another shred of my self-worth committed invisible suicide.  My self-image had been shattered; that woman who used to look back at me in the mirror no longer existed and I no longer knew how to be myself. 

Qualities like passion, joy, boldness, and audacity became things that used to define me. I slowly began to morph into this timid, self-conscious, whimpering, poor-excuse for myself.  I forgot how to have normal conversations with people because I expended all of my energy subconsciously worrying about what they might be thinking about my hair.  I stopped speaking my mind and vocalizing my opinions because I stopped wanting to be noticed.  I stopped having fun and enjoying life.  In fact, I stopped doing anything that required me to let go of how hurt and sad and scared I was.  I was carrying around a ghost, and when you do that, you begin to live like one.

That’s probably the thing I regret most, allowing my life to become about avoidance and invisibility.  Solitude was my greatest solace and so I was naturally seeking it all the time.  Being alone meant not having to pretend that I wasn’t painfully aware of some perpetual scalp discomfort.  There was and still is no perfect solution.  I don’t have enough hair in certain places for braids.  When I grew in enough hair to weave, I was ecstatic but discovered a whole new issue…the desperate itch that amounts to me nearly ripping it off in moments of sheer desperation to reach that unreachable spot.  As far as wigs go, it’s difficult to explain my long and complicated relationship with the many I’ve had.  It’s somewhat of a mixture between gratitude at having a reliable fallback option that can instantaneously transform me into a ‘normal’ looking person and feeling some level of discomfort every second that this foreign body is abiding on my head.  In retrospect, I will admit that I’m now beginning to think the discomfort issue is more psychological than anything else.  I cringe just saying the word.  Wig. Ugh.  Wigs are for grandmothers and cancer patients, not healthy women in their early 20s.  I’m feeling like I’m wearing a glorified hat with hair attached to it and I’m subconsciously on my guard every second I’m wearing it and before long the familiar sensation of pressure against my temples, occipital headaches, and neck pain becomes very real.  But all of that magically goes away when I can walk through my front door, peel that wig off my head, and just be comfortable. 

There are things I won’t do simply because I don’t feel like putting on my hair for it.  It’s incredibly heavy because when I’m wearing it, I’m also wearing a whole different mindset and behavior that feels completely inauthentic to me.  I am a walking closet of coping mechanisms.  So why even bother (you might be wondering)?  Well, that’s a whole other blog entry which I will address some other time.  But in short, walking around with the truth out there hardly seems less desirable.  I don’t want to deal with pity (genuine or fake), ridicule, dazed horror, attempts to be overly sensitive, patronizing kindness, or people being unable to look me in the eye because they are too distracted by the horse-shoe shaped bald spot on my head.  I’ve dealt with all of those to some extent at one point or another and I’m simply not well-adjusted enough of a human being to withstand that level of mortification daily.  So my MO has been, put on the disguise and blend in.  It’s just easier not to be seen.  If no one sees you, then they don’t ask you questions.

 We all have coping mechanisms but I don’t consider anything I described above to be healthy despite the fact that its kept me functioning all of this time.  This is me admitting that I’ve had a problem that is far more than physical.  My mentality…my outlook…my entire self-worth has clearly been based on the wrong things all of this time.  Now its my responsibility to actively reform it.  Hopefully, this site will in part be a personal chronicle (and a physical record of accountability) of the progress I will continue to make…

Look…its my future offspring, lol!

(2005)

My heart is heavy with the plight of nappy-headed black females everywhere.  You know who you are.  You’re the woman who’s just like me.  You don’t have that good hair that’s mixed with Indian.  What you do have is impossibly coarse hair that’s difficult to tame and generations of women in your family who are struggling just like you are for those little things that seem to come so easily to other people…appreciable growth…a healthy sheen…or simply, a way of living peaceably with it.

                I was raised to love myself for who God made me but to take care of what he made me look like; to call my features beautiful even when the world seems to tell me otherwise; to thank God for breath in my body, the active use of my limbs, no physical deformities, and a sound, intelligent mind. (Can I get an amen?!)  These are all valuable lessons that later failed me as I found myself surrounded by silky-haired children with straight noses and futures that required virtually no effort to secure.  I wondered why I was so different; why my hair was so impossible to comb through in its natural state; why everything that was meant to beautify me was always so painful.  Mine was a seemingly endless soap-opera of hot-combs that blackened my ears, perms that incinerated my scalp, and braids that pulled my skin so tight that I had no hope of sleeping or closing my eyes completely for at least a few days after I got them.  For 21 years I’ve tortured my scalp with chemicals, heat damage, tension, and sadistic stylists until one day I found myself washing more hair out of the sink than what was left on my head.  According to my dermatologist, my hair follicles had experienced a massive cell death and that it was in my best interest not to perm or braid again.  I thought to myself, “I’ve finally done it.  I’ve gone and killed my hair!”

                So now I find myself at an impasse.  I can no longer endure the criticism of my mother, yet I refuse to fall back into the cycle of ‘no lye’ conditioners (which, by the way, is a huge lie).  It breaks my heart that my mother, who represents the iconic colored woman rooted in strength, independence, and self-sufficiency feels that I need a perm to be worth employing or marrying.  She looks at me wide-eyed with tears in her eyes pleading that I consider my future.  ‘These are the best years of your life and no decent, respectable man will want to marry you with your hair looking that way.’  For she, like every good mother is attempting to spare me a life that she perceives will be empty with destitution and spinsterhood.

                I respect her intentions and yet I do not respect her basis. It has been a most amusing social experiment to see in what way I am treated differently when my hair looks a certain way.  I need only slap some braids in my head and within the course of a day I go from being virtually invisible to becoming the unwilling object of whistles, cat-calls, phrases like ‘yo shorty!’, and the infamous slow-motion, drive-by stare.  A fresh perm can get me a date before I even walk a full block from the beauty salon.  Yet what has all of that attention warranted me?  A past littered with a slew of men who cared more about getting me into bed than about my complex emotional psyche and the woman I was striving to become.  I was weighed down by a spirit of indiscretion and wantonness, loneliness, heartache, and confusion.  It’s the emptiest feeling in the world to value your character based on what your looks can get you.

                What happens at the end of the day when it comes time to set that wig on the nightstand or cut that weave out or undo those braids? How will my husband (who I long to meet and get to know someday) feel about the hair that is truly mine?  Coarse, wild, God-given, and free it’s the full expression of the DNA that was passed onto me.  Why shouldn’t I love it?  But will he?  Will he harbor some secret resentment that he can’t run his fingers through my authenticity without being halted by stubborn knots?  Will he quietly detest the length that I am lacking or the measures that I have to take to keep myself looking the way he likes?  Will he still think our children are beautiful if they get what their mama has?  And how will I know if when he looks at me what he sees is who I am and not just the way I put myself together?

                Do not mistake me.  I have great aspirations of becoming an influential physician someday.  I have every intention of appearing neat, professional, and credible at all times. But I need to know that if, one day, for whatever reason, I am no longer able to clean up quite the same way…if cancer makes all my hair fall out, or I have an accident that disfigures me so badly that any effort I put into my hair becomes inconsequential…I need to know that I will still be loved, that he will still want to spend the rest of his life with me.  And I’d like to believe that there’s someone out there, for every one of those women like me who simply don’t know what the future holds for us and our hair follicles.  We are seeking more than a physical complement in a husband…we are seeking an emotional, mental, and spiritual counterpart.