Hair Loss (unedited)

I consider myself Black; my mother is not.

Yet, her hair is Black, glossy, and fine. She doesn’t have to brush it. She either uses a Black comb or shakes her hair and it falls untangled to her shoulders. She would have grey (or silver as she liked to call it) hair, but she dyes it regularly “Dark & Lovely” — herself, alone in her bathroom sink not in a salon.

Black, fine, sparse hair crowned my head when I was born.

I know this fact because I saw the professional pictures strewn about my baby book and opened its baby’s first haircut envelope and touched my Black, tiny, soft, straight, first ponytail.

One time I twirled and loosened it, and it began to spread into separate strands. I quickly returned them and closed the book as if someone would come and soon blame me.

My Asian-inspired locks grew until I was eleven months.

Then, my hair fell out, and my hair began to grow like my Black father’s in Black Afro puffs.

My mother had no idea how to do Black (or ethnic as salons liked to call it now) hair.

My father’s Black family thought my mother was uppity and didn’t offer to show her the ropes.

I spent a lot of my youth in crooked plaits dreading the daily moments my mother would rake her wide tooth comb across my tender scalp while humming “Good Morning, Star shine.”

“Good Morning, Star shine. The Earth says hello.”