Looking back, the teasing I endured at school had more to do with hygiene than a lack of fashion sense. We were dirty kids. I mean me and my twin sister. There was an overall assumption around the house that grooming us was optional, wasteful, even. We weren’t made to take baths, rather we were told not to take baths. I remember asking for a bath, because we thought baths were fun, and being told, “No! You’ll use up all the water and make a mess.”
I was in college, braiding a friend’s hair, when she fondly recalled to me her mother brushing and braiding her hair, and I realized I couldn’t remember my mother ever doing the same. Surely someone must have brushed my hair before I was old enough to do it myself, but I can’t recall it.
My mother had a neighbor cut our hair short, bowl-cuts at the kitchen table, and Grace and I sobbed, wanting long hair. “No,” she said, “You can’t take care of it.” We swore we would, we would take such good care of our long hair if she let us have it. No, no you won’t.
“But I’ll be picked on! I look like a boy!”
“No, you won’t. It’s cute.” Okay, on this one she was correct, no one picked on us for short hair. It was normal in 1982. No one picks on you for being normal.
When I complained about being picked on at school, Mom would always say, “Oh boo hoo hoo, let’s have a pity party!” or “They’re just jealous.” But really, the kids at school were enforcing the social norms of cleanliness and dress in the inarticulate way of children. They didn’t know to say “please wash more often, it’s better for the group,” they only had an instinctual revulsion they expressed as, “Go away! You’re so ugly!”
Obviously, my mother wasn’t equipped due to mental illness to teach us to groom ourselves, or even to notice that we weren’t groomed. When I asked her if I was ugly, after all the kids at school said so, her response was, “Who cares what you look like?”
To wit: she didn’t.
No question. We were dirty. And we looked… icky. Clothes were worn until they were crusty and stiff. I spent a whole summer in one pair of cut-offs and three or four t-shirts.
For much of the fourth grade, I had weeping sores around one side of my mouth due to a lack of vitamin C in my “free school lunch only” diet. We suffered from scabbies and lice and hookworm. We were riddled with parasites and every preventable disease, because taking us to the doctor was reserved for severe injuries or imminent danger of death.
We never for a moment thought that maybe she ought to have taught us how to take care of our hair, or pick out outfits, or any of that stuff. If I brought up wanting better clothes or hair, I was told, “You’re so conceited!”
The Ballad of Mousy
My most vivid memory of hair-brushing happened when we were twelve. Several months after Dad got custody, he noticed that Grace and I did not brush our hair, and that we had, in fact, developed thick matts of snarled hair around our heads, “rats nests” that made our hair puff out. (I named mine “Mousy.”)
At first, I thought that my growing-out hair was wavy! One big natural wave? But no. The wave got bigger and thicker.
Mousy was not mouse-sized. Mousy was a full-on Norwegian Ship Rat, puffed inches out from my head and all the way around like that guy in Cloud City’s head gear.
With horror, I realized Mom was right: we couldn’t take care of our hair.
Dad had us sit on the floor in front of his arm chair in the living room, and worked out the snarls by sheer force using a comb and a bowl of water, a painful and long process that resulted in piles of torn hair and sore scalps. Grace went first, and screamed and cried through the ordeal. I was proud to be the toxically masculine twin and suffer my turn in silence.
As he gathered up the piles of hair, Dad said, “Don’t let it get like that again.” We nodded solemnly, gingerly touching our scalps, our thinned curtains of shoulder-length hair. We did not want to go through that ordeal a second time!
Of course, a few weeks later, I noticed a new mat forming below the fullness of my skull at my nape. “I can’t believe it,” I despaired to Grace, “Mousy is back already!”
She patted the matted hair. “Yeah, but it’s smaller, at least?”
I was surprised at the time that Grace wasn’t suffering the same re-mouse-ification. Apparently, a girl at school had casually suggested she brush her hair, and then complimented her when she did. Thank you, Jennifer Square, for peer-mentoring before it was cool.
Rather than endure Dad’s torture again, I cut the snarl out, but then I had all these short hairs at the back of my neck, which, well, snarled, forming a new Mousy even closer to the scalp.
I sniffled and held my chin high, watching myself in the mirror, impressed with my own martyrdom to grooming as I painfully worked a comb down my hair until everything was smooth again,
Slowly, Grace and I learned to comb our hair regularly to avoid the pain of mouse-removal. I started keeping a comb that was “mine” for the first time. Dad let us take a bath once a week, too.
Puberty lead to a fear of zits and hairy legs. We bought deodorant and wiped our faces with rubbing alcohol. We started brushing our hair every morning before school. We invested in de-tangler. We even learned how to make the puffy bangs so popular in the 1980s. (Hot iron curl half your bangs up, half down, comb together straight back, spray to death with hairspray.)
Dad installed a shower, and now bathing would take less water and was allowed whenever we felt like it. (But no longer than fifteen minutes! What are you doing in there? Keep the plug in: I want to see how much water you’re using!)
Grooming is self-care, and maybe, okay, the constant “you’re ugly, you’re stupid, you’re conceited” from kids at school and Mom and Dad and older sister got us to be… less than kind to ourselves, too. But with time and absence of verbal abuse, we’ve gotten better. Grace says she can track her mental health by her shower frequency. I shower when I get sweaty, which means at least three times a week when I’m bike-commuting.
By the time I got to college, I was more or less as clean as a middle-class kid is supposed to be, and I sat in a dorm room slumber party, and no one said “gross” when I asked if they’d braid my hair.
