My oldest-friend, who is as fair and blue-eyed as snow and fjord-water, has a long-legged daughter whose hair is as tight-curled and bubbly as foam breaking on a West Indian beach.
As her daughter’s baby-hair changed from its first silky down, it coiled tight.
What was my silken-straight-haired friend to do?
Her hands only knew how to run a brush through and her clumsy attempts to comb the uncombable, pulled and tugged and made her girl shriek and cry, which was naturally unbearable to them both.
Well, what she did was she looked and she felt, and she asked, and she learned, because she loved her own new creature with a love that could encompass and cherish, and nurture, and see her as she was. The blue eyes saw the brown, the fair straight hair twined with the dark curls.
Now a mother, her gentle pale hands, that she had wringed and worried together in pain and longing, before the tide that chased across oceans and channels brought her daughter to her, learned to oil, and twist and knot and braid her daughter’s hair. Not perfectly, her cornrows a little wobbly, her knots a little loose, but then beauty is not perfection, and neither is love, not in its givings or its expectations: It is much much messier than that, and so all the more beautiful.