New Do

I don't know what I was thinking but I always had these wonderful dreams of having a little black girl with that fun nappy hair to learn to braid and put into a thousand wonderful creations of hairy nappiness and my adorable child would skip gleefully about, happy to have a head full of colorful plaits topped with rows of beads and fun barettes. It's not like that at all. For those of you with similar delusions, let me set the record straight. It may eventually look right cute with even rows of braids and colorful doo-dads, but the process of getting there is a mother-daughter rite of passage which every black woman looks back upon still smarting from the thousands of stabbing pains to her scalp over the years. Ruth is no exception. "Doing her hair" is a dreaded phrase in our household and involves several hours of, well, great pain, great wailing and moaning and a lot of hair grease. Adora and I decided on the spur of the moment yesterday to solve that problem for the discernable future and bought Ruth her first Perm. Adora applied perm to scalp today and we are all quite pleased with the results. I was amazed with the ease with which her hairbrush ran through her hair today with NO WHINING, crying, crocodile tears or painful fidgeting and scratching. Alleluiah! Here's the pictures of Ruth's Great Perm Adventure and the resulting New Do (notice, if you will, the broad smile on Ruth's face).