A Hairy Situation - Hairapy - Why I've always been ashamed of my hair (and bad at titles)

For many years, I would fix my four daughters' hair almost every morning before school. I would brush and braid and clip into place, and despite all the practice, I never got very good at it.

I made messy French braids and high ponys with little baby curls sticking straight out like a halo and pigtails that were never quite even.

I bought hair bands, stiff, stretchy, narrow, wide, and giant bows and satiny ribbons and colorful scrunchies and those tiny pastel colored rubberbands when my girls asked me to recreate styles they'd seen on TV or on their friends. I would look at pictures and YouTube tutorials and then section off a thousand ponytails that had to be braided and wrapped and knotted together but I could never make it look quite right.

I bought brand-name detangling shampoo that smelled like strawberry and bubblegum and four small oval hot-pink brushes without handles that I saw on an infomercial. Those plastic and rubber brushes were supposed to detangle without tears and protect their hair and add shine and make me feel like a competent mother. They did none of those things.

But I did like my hands that looked like my mother's in their soft baby hair, one red, one nearly black, and the twins' light brown like mine.

I would eventually find all the hairbands bent and broken under couch cushions, the vacuum forever sucking up hair ties of all sizes and colors strewn over the floors and matted into the carpet and the dog eating their favorite scrunchies along with their smelliest socks. The hairclips I carefully fastened onto their temples before school failed to keep their wispy bangs out of their eyes by the time they arrived in their classrooms, and were either hanging on by a single hair in the afternoon or had been irretrievably lost, added to the debris of schoolchildren dropping things out of their hands and off their bodies, out of their pockets and backpacks, adding, adding, adding to the layer of Dollar store toys and lunchboxes and gym socks and permission slips and chewed-up pencils with pom-poms at the top that raises the floor of every school and family home and playground.

I just kept buying more. Kept brushing and braiding and watching YouTube tutorials.

Today, I stood in front of the mirror, blindly braiding my fine hair into a French braid behind my head, just like I used to as a kid. I would get up in the morning, when everything was still dark and nobody else was awake yet, get myself ready for school, attempt to do my hair, and then walk the few blocks to my elementary school. I was always ashamed that I looked like I'd done it myself, always trying and failing to look like my mother got up and fixed my hair before school.

The braid today was messy, just like every other time I attempted one on myself or my daughters, who also always looked like they'd done it themselves. But they were not ashamed.

I wrote this yesterday as part of the 100 Days of Making and thought it fit this week's writing prompt about embodied writing. If you have something you'd like to submit to me that you're willing to share with the Unmentionables Community, please email it to juliane@bergmannconsulting.com by the end of today.

Below, I'm sharing a poem fragment I originally published on Sep 24, 2025, because it also fits this week's prompt. I wrote this in a workshop on the book Women Who Run with the Wolves by clarissa pinkola estés reyés. Highly recommend reading this incredible book.

What My Bones Know

I collect my auntie’s bones,

brittle from decades of starving herself

of cutting pastries into thin slices

and making an entire meal

out of eight segments

of a dry tangerine.

I collect my daughter’s bones,

the ones I saw when she cut through

the soft flesh of her hands

too deep

She meant no real harm

she said

Just needed to feel something

other than pain

or maybe

a different kind of pain.

I collect my father’s bones

his knee joints like glass

unsteady on ice and uneven ground

always cracking knuckles

a spine crooked from carrying

a childhood burden

so heavy

I’ll never know how he carried it all the way

into adulthood

on those glass knees.

I collect my mother’s bones

the ones I pushed aside

making room for my head

bone to bone

her screams reverberating in my skull.

Unrelated side note: What My Bones Know is also the title of a memoir about complex PTSD by Stephanie Foo, which includes the most fascinating exploration of a therapeutic relationship. Highly recommend.

PS: Are you feeling meh about writing, constantly staring at a blank page, generally being bored with what you've written, can't figure out what to do with that flat character or the essay that just isn't working? Come join me for an experimental writing class with Melanie Shirley! It will be weird. It will be fun. It will get you unstuck in the most surprising way.

PPS: I still don't know why I'm so bad at titles.