Motivation (or lack thereof)

Lately, it seems I am having an extremely hard time staying motivated to do anything.  I guess I'm just kind of in a funk which is why I haven't updated this blog very much.
With my current schedule of being home all day with two small children, I am having a hard time trying to find a good time to wash my hair & de-tangle it.  I usually try to do this when they take their 2-3 hour nap, but there are usually other things that also need to get done and can only be done when the babies are asleep.  The evenings are hectic as well and by the time all the kids are in bed, I'm just too tired to go through the whole 1-1.5 hour process which means I usually end up in bed with half of my head de-tangled and must do the rest at some point the following day.
I think I'm kind of spoiled now with my natural hair because daily styling only takes about 5 minutes or less and I'm still complaining about having to do a 1 hour process once a week or so.  Ha!  What is my problem anyway.  Oh well, it will be better soon.
By the way, tried the Trader Joe's Nourish Spa condition and LOVE it!  It does work differently on my hair than it does on my daughter's.  I wonder if there are any two heads of hair exactly alike.  It's so hard for me to figure out what products are going to work well & what aren't.  I'm not yet ready to spend a whole lot of money trying something that might not work.  I'll just take it a little at a time.

Disturbing...

First of all, let me tell you about a new website: Black Girl With Long Hair I LOVE it!  It has great pictures of women who have gone natural and they are so beautiful.  The site also has great articles/posts including this one: Interview with Aron Ranen  Be sure to watch the video at the end.  It makes me so sad that we African Americans are taking money from our own businesses and pouring it into other businesses without any thought.  First of all, I want to say there is nothing wrong with shopping at a store that is not Black-owned, BUT when our Black-owned businesses are shutting down in Black neighborhoods b/c of other businesses, that is just sad!  How are we going to get anywhere if we don't support our own?!  If you think about Jewish, or Asian communities where a high concentration of a certain ethnicity lives, they have THEIR OWN businesses in those neighborhoods and the people of the neighborhood support those businesses instead of traveling elsewhere.  That's why so many of those places have been around for decades.  We need to do the same.  We spend BILLIONS of dollars in haircare.  How many Black families could we be supporting with that money?  How many Black teenagers could we keep off of the streets and out of jails if they were working in a legitimate family business???  There is no excuse for Black people not to patronize Black hair care stores.  No excuse.  Maybe I need to open up one of my own one day...

Happy to be Nappy :-)

I'm addicted to Youtube natural hair videos, especially those from ShidaNatural.  She is so wonderful, always posting step by step trials of different products.  I really wouldn't have finally done my big chop if it weren't for her videos & the fact that she has tried so many different products. 
Anyway, I just want to post about all of the compliments I have been receiving!  Even when I am not exactly liking my hair on a certain day, people still tell me how great I look.  I have been told I'm "glowing" (& I'm definitely not pregnant! LOL), that I have just been "looking so good lately," and all kinds of nice things.  It's so funny because I couldn't have imagined hearing so many positive responses from people with natural and relaxed hair.  I always figured the compliments would come once my hair grew long again, but I'm walking around with a curly 'fro and people act like....well I don't know, but I'm just getting 1000% more positive reactions than I ever expected! :-) 

"A-FRO-dite"

So right now I have a real 'fro and I'm not sure how much I like it. I have gotten many compliments on it, but I think my face looks too fat. Actually, my face is too fat since I need to lose at least 15 lbs. Maybe once I do that, I will be happy with any natural style. I'm just not sure why my hair isn't staying the way I want it. Yesterday it looked great, but I must have skipped a step today.

I have to do so much experimentation it's ridiculous. On a positive note, all of this experimenting is causing me to care about my appearance again. For at least the last year, I haven't really cared too much about how I looked. I guess I was in a mental state where I felt it was a lost cause until I made a concrete decision on my hair. Now that I've taken this step, it's amazing how my self esteem has soared! It's a wonderful feeling.

Empowerment

It's been almost a week since I took the plunge and I'm still feeling great. I have gotten so many compliments about my new style and I don't regret my decision for one minute. My husband is even okay with it. Even though he has always preferred long, straight hair, he still thinks my new style looks good on me. I believe a big part of it has been the fact that I am once again liking the way I look and in return, I am caring more about my appearance in general.

For months, I had been feeling so hopeless about my hair that I just kind of gave up. I just slapped it back into a bun and went out the door. There were a few times that I attempted a style, but it always seemed to backfire so most days I went back to the old ugly standby. Now I am like a new person. I've been smiling more & my attitude in general has improved. It's so interesting that when you make one positive change in your life, so many other things line up and change for the better as well.

On a funny note, sometimes when I look in the mirror, the first person that pops into my head is Wanda Sykes! LOL Of course I didn't mention it to Charles, I just waited until he noticed it. It didn't take long, yesterday he was teasing me & called me Wanda. I was just cracking up. I know him & I knew he would say it. :-)

One more thing before I go to sleep - I love playing with my hair and stretching out my curls just for them to spring back. I never played in my hair this much before, but it's so springy and soft I just LOVE IT! (Can anyone tell that I'm happy? :-) )

I DID IT!!

I finally got rid of those raggedy relaxed ends. Now my hair can grow as long as I want it. Now I can do all the cute natural styles that never came out right because I had raggedy ends. I'm ecstatic. My family on the other hand is not as supportive.

Quotes after I did my conditioner treatment so it was still wet & curly:

"Are you going to leave it like that? I don't really dig the jheri curl look." (husband)

"Oh my gosh, it's so puffy!" (stepdaughter)

"Woah Mom, you have a fro like Will Smith!" (oldest son {and when the heck did Will Smith ever have a fro??})

So I didn't exactly get a rave review from the family, but I'm alright with that. I knew my husband wouldn't love it b/c every woman in his family has straight hair, but if he doesn't like it, that's his problem. Now when it comes to my hair, I'm going to work with what God gave me without permanently chemically altering it. I'm done doing things to my hair just to conform to what everyone else wants. Whoever doesn't like "Curly" Natalie will just have to get used to it because she's here to stay. :-)

Today Is the Day

In about an hour, I will make the biggest hair change of my life. Of course now I'm starting to have some mixed feelings. I had a nonchalant attitude about it all until last night when I realized this is it. I can't go back once it's done.
I'm not trying to talk myself out of it though. I know there are people who will think I look weird or ugly, but I'm not concerned about them. I am doing this for the health of my hair and to have the freedom to do what I want with the hair I was born with.
I realize it won't be as easy to deal with as it would had I been born with naturally straight, or wavy hair as opposed to tightly curly. I'm ready though. I will make this work. The whole sad part about it is so many of us with this type of hair have to take such a big emotional/mental step when it comes to loving the hair we were born with. Why can't we just learn to love it from the start? I will never blame my mother, or her mother, or any of my ancestors for causing me not to love my natural hair. All of the blame goes to this crazy society in which everything associated with our African roots has been made out to be ugly and undesirable. It's changing little by little and someday we can all love how we are.

More Adjusting

It's starting to hit me that I will soon have short hair. The shortest my hair has ever been was just below my chin and that was almost 10 years ago. It's going to be strange, but I'm excited nonetheless. I will just keep holding onto the thought that hair grows back.

Of course my husband has already said a few smartass comments about it all, but that's okay. I can understand that he's been brainwashed, just like most of us, into thinking straight hair is superior. What makes me happy is that I am educating myself about taking care of my hair in its natural state now, at a time when my daughter is starting to look at herself in the mirror and have a feeling about how she looks. She is even starting to tell me different ways she wants to wear her hair. Lately, instead of her normal braids, she wants to wear it "fluffy" where I'll put it in ponytails and braid it the night before, then take out the braids in the morning. It's so cute, but does get frizzy. However, I have solved that by using the washing/detangling method from tightlycurly.com.

What is so great is that I have broken the generations-old cycle of the women in my family hating their natural hair and not knowing what to do with it. I can't explain how good it makes me feel to know that my daughter won't feel that she has no other option but to put a relaxer in her hair. She will know that it is possible to manage her hair and for it to be healthy. I truly thank God for all of the information that is available now and all of the different options we have. I wish I had been able to get all of this the first time I decided to go natural. Back then, there were only a small handful of halfway decent sites and of those, most of the people were getting dreads. (I have nothing against dreads, but I want my hair to be versatile so that if I want a smooth look sometimes, I won't have to start all over, or get a wig.)

That's all for now. My goal is to keep this updated regularly - we'll see. ;-)

3 Days Until the BIG CHOP!

So I decided that since this is such a significant turning point in my life, I'm going to attempt to blog about it.
I'm 30 years old and have been relaxing my hair for the last 20 years! (Save for about a year in the early 2000s where I attempted to go natural, but gave up and went back to the lye.) I just got tired of feeling as though my hair had to conform. I have hated the fact that I have to use chemicals that burn my scalp, have an unpleasant smell, and eventually break my hair off. I would say the last straw was _________, but I have several last straws so I will list them:

• My hair had gotten so long and thick during my last pregnancy, I couldn't wait to see what it would be like once I got a perm. Afterward, it was beautiful and straight and actually came down past my armpit, but then it started breaking off. I had this area in the back that felt as though it didn't even take the relaxer and eventually, my hair broke off to about shoulder-length.
• I was so tired of hearing people tell me I needed to go to the shop and get my hair done. I didn't want to pay the money and didn't want to get stuck back in the cycle of shelling out a ridiculous amount every 6-8 weeks just so I could have hair that looked like someone else's.
• I started thinking about my daughter. She has beautiful curly hair that reaches to her waist when it's wet or stretched out. I started wondering how much it would break off and how short it would become once she decided to get a relaxer. I then realized that if I could get her to love her hair the way it is, she wouldn't have the desire to permanently alter it!

There were many other things that contributed to this decision, but it boils down to what is good for me and also, my daughter. I remember watching Claire Huxtable and looking at my mom thinking how I couldn't wait to grow up so my hair will turn into something beautiful and manageable that I could swing around. I honestly thought that your nappy hair grows out as you get older and is replaced by straight hair! LOL It's so funny looking back on it, but it is also sad. If only I had had more role models who wore their hair natural so that I could see that was an option too. If I had known about the pitfalls of using shampoo made for straight hair and the damage done by using too much heat, if only my mother had known...

The good news is now we know! I have already planted the seed in my little girl's mind that her curls are beautiful and she is special because she has curly hair. I even tried the washing/conditioning method from tightlycurly.com on her and it turned out beautifully! It looked like she had gotten a straw set. Her curls literally bounced up and down every time she moved her head. She loved swinging her hair around and kept going back to the mirror. I almost cried. How wonderful that I could get my daughter to love her hair just as deeply as I had hated mine. I was truly thankful and I told God so. Now I know that she will not hastily make the decision to permanently straighten her hair - she may not do it at all. My hope is for her to know that she has so many options, that the hair she was born with is unique and beautiful, and that she does not have to conform to the standard of another race. My hope is that she believes that what she has is good enough. My hope is that she loves herself completely.