CALL ME FRIEDA
(a hair-raising tale)

1 March 2003

These thoughts were sparked by an entry written in Under the Microscope a few weeks ago. The entry concerned hair curling.

I have naturally curly hair. Like Frieda in the Peanuts comic strip. Frieda appears to have become the forgotten Peanuts character because I searched all over the Internet to find a graphic and couldn't. My hair has been the source of much comment throughout my life. (My mother's favorite comment: "Look at that hair! It makes me sick!" ...she means that in a good way; she covets my hair)

I didn't quite have the tight ringlets that Shirley temple did when I was a kid (or at least they look much more loose in the photos I see), but as I got older the curls became more pronounced.

As the hair grew longer, my mother would form long curls which eventually fell to my shoulders. As she tells it, it was a struggle each morning because curling them involved brushing out the curls from the previous day, and, she tells me, after she brushed the hair into curls, they would tighten up as the day wore on, so that by morning, it was like trying to brush out a tightly coiled spring. Each morning's brushing session involved a lot of tears (fortunately I don't remember this).

The fight over my curls went on for seven years until one day when we were on vacation when she asked me if I wanted to have my hair cut. I said yes, and she took me to a beauty salon to have all of those long curls cut off. She couldn't bear to watch and left me there.

A funny thing happened when the hair was cut. Instead of starting all over again with the short curly hair, my hair went straight. Well, not entirely straight. It always had a natural wave in it, but it was decades before I could say that I had "curly" hair again.

Oh my hair looked curly during all those years. I was now into the world of pin curls, brush rollers, permanent waves. Even though my "natural" curl was gone, the wave stayed, so it was easy to get the hair to do what I wanted.

Of course I wasn't the one getting it to do what I wanted it to do. My mother did my hair for me until I graduated from high school. In fact one of my biggest concerns about going into the convent was that I had never done my own hair and I didn't know how to do it (somehow I think that might have been a clue as to the depth of my "vocation"!!)

We went to Hawaii as a last fling, spending the money my godmother had left me in her will. I had my hair cut short for that trip and learned how to make simple pin curls so that I could at least make my hair look like "something" for those first crucial 6 months. Then, of course, I never went into the convent, but I had taken over doing my own hair. I learned to roll and sleep on brush rollers--those instruments of torture--but I never did learn how to work a hair dryer effectively. I even wore a "fall" once so my hair could be long and straight, since it never grew that way.

We entered the years where it was politically acceptable to be barefoot, bra-less and pregnant and I was all three. To go along with it, I let my hair grow long. I dreamed of having long luxurious tresses. Instead I got this bushy "thing" that looked horrible. After four years, I couldn't stand it any more and had it all cut off.

When my hair was short once again, a very strange thing happened. A beautician told me this was not uncommon--the curl came back. No longer did I just have body with waves, I actually had curls again--not tight curls, but very definitely curls. The explanation was that it was like a spring and if you hang a weight on it (e.g., by letting the hair grow for a long period of time), it all "springs back" when you remove the weight.

I didn't care. It became a joy to take care of. I didn't have to do much of anything. No matter what the length, I just washed it, brushed it into somewhat of the shape I wanted it to be when it dried, and that was it. "I hate you," my mother frequently says.