Hair

I have a hair appointment next week. I will pay far too much for a skilled stylist to color my hair. Then later I will pay again for another person to keep it short. She will make sure that it looks natural. As if it were always short, always framed my face and always lifted slightly off my forehead. But there is nothing natural about my hair.

I am conflicted about this process.  The women who do my hair with such skill have been doing it for years. I listen to their lives and they listen to mine. I've been with them through marriages and divorces, cancer deaths, addiction recovery, knee replacements and a child with downs syndrome.  They have listened to me raise four children to adulthood, with all the joys and sorrows that has brought. We are tied together in a unique bond, stylist and stylee.

But so much money, so much time and energy going into hair? My rational brain tells me this is ridiculous. Hair has no significance unless we give it. And yet I give it freely. I don't wear makeup, do my nails or pluck my eyebrows. But I still invest in my hair. Because when I look in the mirror, I have no rational brain. It's pure emotion. Hair that's behaving gives me confidence. Hair that lies too flat or sticks out in the wrong places or shows too much grey, destroys it.

Sometimes I wonder if a hijab wouldn't be better. There's never a bad hair day, and it makes a nice, hands-free cell phone holder. I've seen many women talking on phones held in place by hijabs. Plus, revealing less, you would have to find your confidence from within.

This is what people miss about muslim women. The confidence. It's the covering that throws them off because we assume that no one would cover themselves voluntarily. They must be forced by men. But it's not that simple. A muslim woman doesn't put on a headscarf or hijab for a man. She does it for her God. And for herself. It identifies her as part of her culture, a group that gives her life meaning and keeps her safe. In other words, it gives her confidence.

This is what Donald Trump missed when he saw Ghazala Khan stand beside her husband on the DNC stage. He got distracted by the headscarf and missed the confidence. It's been interesting to see the consequences of his attack on her. The hashtag fury of accomplished women, demanding to be heard. If Donald had asked, I could have told him he was stepping into a hornet's nest. Never mess with muslim women. They are some of the toughest people on the planet.

Once, I taught my adult ESL class wearing a headscarf. I'd been to the dermatologist and planned to go back to class after, but I didn't plan on the hideous bandage on my head. I grabbed a scarf from my car and voila!

"Teacher! You look so nice!" said my students. They were so excited. All those trips to the hairdresser, and it was covering my hair that made me beautiful to them. Maybe I looked more confident, too.

Veiled

It was startling. Only the eyes.  I tried not to stare at my new student. I'd seen others like her before, who chose to cover their faces, but never in my English class. She was tall and thin and so timid that I could barely hear her voice through the veil. She was late the first day because she got lost. She seemed a little lost the whole term. 

At the beginning of the next term, a Latina woman and a woman from Ethiopia came in and sat down. I began to try to learn their names the way I always do. Large post-it notes with their first names on them went on the table in front of them, facing me. “So I can see your name. Face. Name. Face. And remember,” I said. My hands moved from the table to their faces, up and down. 

Just before class was supposed to start, a woman in a hijab walked in and sat in the back. Another new student. “And what’s your name? I need to write it on this paper,” I said. 

“Teacher, it’s me.  I’m not a new student.”

I stared at her face. It was true. The eyes were right. The voice was right. But I had never seen her face before. For the entire previous term, she had covered it with a veil. 

The fascinating thing was I had created a face for her. Her eyes were beautiful. Huge and trusting. Her long lashes used to get tangled in the top of the veil. She constantly pulled it down to see. I assumed that the veil was hiding unparalleled beauty, that those who gazed upon her face would be struck dumb by it’s radiance. 

Unveiled, the thing that struck me about her wasn’t her eyes. It was her crooked teeth. She was beautiful, to be sure, but not in the way of goddesses. She was a mere mortal, who—had she grown up in Minnesota—would have spent her adolescence dreading trips to the orthodontist to tighten her braces.