What I‘ve Done to My Hair, and What It‘s Done to Me

Tied up in my hair is my Jewish identity, my gender expression, my rebelliousness, and a physical manifestation of my depression

When I was a very little girl, I had Shirley Temple curls. “Banana curls,” my mom called them. “People pay a lot of money for curls like yours,” strangers would tell me.

My mom hated her own hair. She said it felt like Brillo.

I got lice in first grade. My hair was down to my butt. Every morning my mom would put it in a French braid. Once I got to school I’d have to go to the nurse’s office and she would unbraid my hair, check for nits, and braid it again. It was an annoyance and the tugging hurt, but the school nurse was nice and I didn’t mind seeing her every morning.

In second grade my family took a vacation to the Bahamas. The Bahamian women on the beach all wanted to braid my hair. I acquiesced. It took a very long time, and it hurt my scalp. It was probably expensive. I liked the way my beads jangled, and I liked showing them off when I got back to school. For a white girl at a private school, coming back from vacation with braids was an indicator of wealth, proof of the affluence for a holiday in the Caribbean. It didn’t occur to me at that age that what I considered to be an exotic souvenir was anyone’s cultural practice, or that a bias against a hairstyle could be racism.

When I was 13, I got a buzz-cut the morning after my Bat Mitzvah party. At the party I had my long curly hair in an elegant updo. My dad took video that night, asking my friends and classmate to record a message for me. Many of them said how beautiful my hair was.

The next morning I went to my hairdresser’s home. He doesn’t work Sundays, but my mom had been his customer for so long that he saw me at his house as a personal favor. (She still sees the same hairdresser. That relationship has lasted longer than her marriage to my dad.) He put my hair into a ponytail, cut it off, and handed it to me. He took an electric razor and buzzed my hair down to about a quarter inch.

I fancied myself a rebel at that age. I had a “You laugh because I’m different. I laugh because you’re all the same” sticker plastered on my English binder. I listened to Limp Bizkit and NoFX and loathed the pretty, popular girls who wore Tiffany bean necklaces and Abercrombie and Fitch. They all had straight hair.

I don’t remember people’s reactions at school the Monday after I got the buzz-cut. I remember later a few people told me they admired me for cutting all my hair off and donating it to Locks of Love. One girl I didn’t know very well was inspired to cut her hair short too.

I never got around to donating my hair to Locks of Love. My severed ponytail is still sitting in a padded envelope in the desk drawer of my childhood bedroom. I really had intended to donate, but that wasn’t the real reason I did it. I wanted to stand out. It worked, though the admiration was undeserved. Several months later I went over to my friend Molly’s house and she bleached and dyed my now-inch-long hair hot pink. I wore a beanie to school the next day covering my hair. My Principal told me to take the hat off, since they weren’t allowed. I took the hat off. He told me to put it back on until after morning prayers because it would be distracting. School pictures were that week. I didn’t plan it like that, but it was one of the better school pictures I’ve ever had.

At summer camp that year, my hair bushy and back to brown, the boys called me a dyke. One time at lunch the boy I had a crush on said I masturbated with a cucumber. His counselor laughed at the joke. Later, on the path to the lake the boy said, “Rachel has two ‘fros,” and looked pointedly between my legs and back up at my head. I liked the attention. I liked that he was thinking about between my legs. But I was furiously embarrassed.

Long hair is feminine. Short hair is dykey. I got that message loud and clear when I shaved my head. But to be truly feminine, your hair must be both long and straight. Girls with curly hair are bookish, geeky, or tomboys — Hermione, Merida, Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries before she gets a makeover. Sometimes curly hair comes into fashion, but trendy curls are artificial. Real curls are wild and unkempt. Real women, we’re told, are not.

All women’s hair is subject to beauty standards meant to sell products, but curly hair has its own niche market, its own line of products to make you feel bad about the way your hair grows. Curly hair must be specially cared for; more than that it must be tamed. Curly hair has rules: Don’t wash it too often. Don’t use too much heat. Don’t brush it. Don’t use products with silicones. It’s the “dry clean only” garment of hair.

Tied up in my hair is my Jewish identity, my gender expression, and a manifestation of my depression. My hair is the canary in the coalmine. When my mental state worsens, I stop taking care of myself, and washing my hair is usually the first thing to go. I’ve called myself low-maintenance, and I’ve called myself lazy. But in honesty, I am depressed. Keeping my hair short like it is now isn’t about convenience or laziness; it’s a survival tactic.

In high school my hair grew out long. I would go weeks without washing it and it would knot up, all matted in back. When I would finally wash it, I stood in the shower tearing a comb through the knots slathered in conditioner while the water turned cold. I vowed to take better care of myself.

I didn’t.

In 10th grade my head itched. I asked my mom to check for nits. She didn’t see anything. A few weeks later in Spanish class I scratched my head and looked down to see a bug on my finger. A louse. I stood up and ran to the bathroom. I parted my hair and looked in the mirror to see my scalp crawling with fully-grown lice. That night I stood naked in the bathroom shivering and crying while my mom went through my hair with a lice comb and scrubbed my head with lice shampoo. All my blankets and pillows went into plastic bags. I didn’t go to school the next day.

If I ever get lice again, I’ll cut off all my hair, I thought.

Having lice isn’t something to be ashamed of. People with clean hair get lice, too. But my hair was dirty, I was dirty, so I was ashamed.

It wasn’t until college that it occurred to me to consider that I “looked” Jewish. Not all Rachels are Jewish, but most of the Rachels I’ve met with dark curly hair are. My boyfriend in junior year of college had dark corkscrew curls. He was Cuban. I joked that I could pass him off as Jewish to my family, Goodfellas style. In the US, “looking Jewish” usually means looking like an Ashkenazi Jew of Eastern-European descent. “Looking Jewish” evokes the Nazi’s Nuremberg Laws — Untermenschen, sub-human, not Aryan.

When I was 23 my mom paid for me to have my hair straightened with a keratin treatment. “It changed my life!” She said. I had had my hair blow-dried straight before, but this was different. It was smooth and silky. I could get it wet and it would still be straight. I could put my hair into a ponytail and it would still look okay when I took it down. It took me several weeks to realize I could brush my hair while it was dry. It lasted for months.

I still identified as a curly-haired girl. I felt like a traitor to Jewish girls everywhere. Delilah.

I have never been discriminated against based on my hair. I felt like a sell-out when I straightened it, but nobody accused me of trying to assimilate or of being untrue to my heritage or to myself. My struggle with my hair gets to be personal, not political. These are the things I remind myself when I worry that my hair makes me look too feminine or too unfeminine, too Jewish or not Jewish enough.

I did not get lice again, and I did not cut off all my hair. I do keep it short, because otherwise it will get matted when I get depressed. I have a haircut the boys from camp would say looked “dykey.” I don’t straighten it anymore. My hair marks me out as a Jew, a Hermione, a person who needs a lot of care, a person who can’t always give herself the care she needs.