When you’re a little girl, you idolize your mommy. You want to do everything she does, be just like her. Well, I did. She is your first emblem of beauty. Well, she was mine. And my mommy was a half Chinese lady with thick loose curls, who would go to the hairdresser every week and come out looking like the woman on the cover of a magazine. I wanted my hair to flow like that. But, I was the product of a half Chinese lady and a black man which meant my curls were extremely tight and my hair, thick as wool. And my mother, bless her soul, could not canerow (cornrow), did not believe in tight hairstyles, beads (because they were too heavy for my little head, weave or any type of false hair – a definite no-no, and did not give me hairstyles like my friends at school. She did nevertheless, wash my hair meticulously every week, as tedious as it was and spend hours combing it out and plaiting it up the best way she knew how. By Jamaican standards, however, if your child’s hair is not slicked back or braided tightly, your child’s hair is not combed. Anyway, their criticisms didn’t bother her nor me, (for a while) and I continued to go to school with puffy hair.

In my last prep school (elementary school) years, my hair situation was at a point where everyone started offering to ‘comb’ it. My godmother, who slaved over the hair, for hours, dripping in sweat in an effort to texturize my hair to make it more manageable, my best friend at the time’s mom and my 5th-grade teacher; all of them had a go at my hair. The truth is, I didn’t know how to comb it or manage it and my mother was over the hair at that point. YouTube had literally just been created, so hair tutorials and tips weren’t a thing. There wasn’t much natural hair product knowledge and information and if there was, it was nowhere near what it is today.

Eventually, with me trying to do my hair myself, I got fed up and it was looking more and more like a hot mess. I was tired of people saying to me “You cyaa comb you hair”(Why don’t you comb your hair?); “lawd anna how your modda mek you leave the house suh” (How did your mother allow you to leave the house looking like that?); “baga wire”; “is a shame you didn’t get more of your mother hair” and more. I was frustrated, and despite my mother and aunty pleading with me, not to relax my hair, I decided I had no other choice.

As a matter of fact, the day I went to relax my hair the first time, I went to another aunty (who is a hairdresser). She actually repeatedly said “bag a wire” in reference to my hair, of course jokingly, not meaning to hurt my feelings when trying to comb it out. But that surely confirmed that I was making the right decision to relax my hair.

So, I did the deed.

Sometime after that, I was surprised to find that my hair didn’t revert to the way it used to be when it got wet. The realization upset me to the point of tears. I asked Mommy why she didn’t warn me and she swiftly reminded me that she did. So, at that point, I decided I would grow my hair out, go back natural.

A year later, I was almost fully natural and landed in the same problem again, the hair was still big, ‘puffy’. The offers to help me with my hair continued, from my mother’s students to my next-door neighbour’s nanny. But I was honestly grateful for any instance when I wouldn’t have to deal with it. I couldn’t get a slick back bun. There was no gel in my house. Who knew about gel? I didn’t. I couldn’t manage it. I couldn’t straighten it and get it to look the way I wanted, my mommy couldn’t bother and going to the hairdresser every week wasn’t an option. To be honest, my hairdresser at that time would’ve just relaxed it anyway. If I had a question in my head about whether or not to go natural and I’d ask my hairdresser, she’d look at me like I was crazy. She’d ask why I would want to do that, if I knew that meant my hair would be puffy and frizzy and be unmanageable. So, I decided why not just relax it again? And I went down the rabbit-hole.

By the end of 2014, I was in my junior year of boarding school, and I’d started to relax it myself and then well…I’ll link ,the story of what happened during that period…