Since starting this blog, my mind has been churning with memories about my experiences with hair. And as I process all of these thoughts, a saying comes to mind: "humor is pain plus distance". That is to say, a lot of these memories about my hair are painful, but a span of 20, 15, and 10 years between them and my present self has immortalized them as laughable anecdotes.
Many of these memories involve more than just me. They involve my mother and my grandmother, two women who spent cumulative days' worth of time simply doing my hair, which I recall as never, ever being anything close to simple.
I have been back home in Minnesota for the weekend, the place that holds all these memories, talking with my mom and my Nana about their experiences with doing my hair. As expected, per the above quotation, there has been a lot of laughter. Which probably means that there was an equal amount of pain to begin with. In the next couple of days, I'll be sitting down and interviewing both of them for this blog; as I continue down the path of going natural, I recognize the value of being able to go back and learn about where, how and why the chemical process all began.
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