My hair has been a battle for as long as I can remember. I’ve always had a lot of hair, and I’m grateful for that! I was a tender headed child, which made the job of doing my hair very unpleasant for my mother. As a kid, having a lot of thick curly hair made for hair battles with mom every morning, tears with detangling after swimming, and fights about hairstyles. I hated having my hair done, but I loved my long braids.

I had my first relaxer when I was 10 years old. After taking over the job of doing my own hair, I managed to get it completely matted. My mother finally gave up and took me to the salon. I cried while they detangled the mess I’d made and put on the relaxer cream to straighten my hair. It was so pretty and smooth! This began the years of maintenance, heat damage from curling irons and dryness from hair dryers. Avoiding humidity at all costs was required to save the hair style. Swimming was less fun too – I’d have to restyle my hair all over again. But in high school I learned to roller set my hair, wrap it when I was asleep, and protect it with satin scarves. Sound familiar to all my friends with a relaxer in your past?

Many years later, just after the first baby, I started losing my hair. A few weeks after her birth, my hair started coming out in handfuls. At first I wasn’t worried – I knew this was common because of the changes in hormones after delivery (it’s called telogen effluvium and many women experience this in varying degrees with abrupt changes in hormones). But then I started seeing my hairline recede! I didn’t have a stylist. For me, many stylists wanted to use too much heat, or didn’t know how to do a good wash-and-set, or got too happy with the scissors. So I got recommendations for someone and high-tailed it in to the salon. The stylist looked at my hair, recommended TLC, time, and not using a relaxer for a few months. I was willing to do whatever not to make the hair loss worse!

After four months without a touch-up relaxer, I started feeling waves and bumps at my roots: big ones. They felt kind of nice… So I started thinking: What would my hair be like without the chemicals? What does my natural hair look like? And then I looked at my baby girl and thought some more. This little girl would grow up like many other girls, thinking that her mommy was the most beautiful woman in the world, and that she wanted to be just like her mommy. She would want straight hair if mommy had straight hair. But she already had such beautiful curly hair! And I wanted her to love her curls, not fight them with heat and chemicals. THAT was the end of the relaxer.

Months went by, and though I didn’t chemically straighten my hair, I kept roller setting and wrapping my hair to wear it straight. It got harder and harder to do, because the relaxed hair at the ends tangled terribly and the curly hair didn’t conform to the roller setting very well. It was time for the BIG CHOP.This made me very nervous – I had only trimmed my hair for years. My hair had been between my shoulder blades my whole life, and I liked it that way. But the hair needed to be cut, so I did my research and found a stylist in the city who specialized in natural hair. We cut off the relaxed hair and I was finally a naturally curly girl! My hair was above my shoulders for the first time since I was a small girl. But I loved how it felt. It was so soft and springy! I couldn’t keep my hands out of it!

Then began the experimentation with products for curly hair. I hadn’t used anything that might weigh my hair down before, but now I wanted to clump and define my curls. This required different styling methods than I’d ever used in the past. I tried gels, pomades, creams. If you are trying to go natural, you know what I’m talking about! Every product for curly hair is not going to work for your hair. Some are too light, too greasy, too stiff. Some flake in your hair, and some don’t last very long. And if you have a lot of hair, using as much as you need becomes kind of pricey. When you find one you like, you want to stockpile it!? Then you have a graveyard of expensive products that you don’t want to throw away. Still, it was fun to play with my new hair, so I kept trying different things.

Today I wear my hair curly. If I straighten it, it’s longer than it ever was before, down to the middle of my back. And it’s healthy, strong, and doesn’t break off like it did when the ends were damaged. My girls love their hair and appreciate the beauty of curly hair. They have asked my to straighten theirs, and I did. Once. They thought it was fun for awhile, but then preferred to go back to their curls and braids. My baby girl says to me, “Mommy, shake your curls!” I do, and she giggles. I love my curls!