BACK TO SCHOOL
a september recap in books, beauty and the fear of institutional control
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On Sunday I washed my hair with apple cider vinegar because I am too cheap–like WAY too cheap–to buy Hair Story, a $50 product recommended by an Instagram popular hair stylist who does a lot of great cuts. That’s not to say I didn’t try. The reviews on Amazon were not that great and Reddit said that though people were happy with it, I wasn’t alone in thinking that it was too expensive. I asked the internet whether Trader Joe’s has a dupe and actually they do! Reddit users had some thoughts on that product too, mostly positive, and one person said that it did everything that they wanted a good hair product to do and that its only rival was apple cider vinegar. That murky substance, called the “MOTHER” that lurks at the bottom of the strong smelling stuff is a part of my grocery list because it helps me with the one thing I make well: bone broth from scratch.
With two hours left of alone time I sprayed my hair with one part ACV and four or five parts water and let it sit for 5 minutes before washing it out and finishing with some conditioner, which is what Bragg’s recommends. Then I forgot all about it. The whole thing came about because on Friday I noticed that at the Latinx festival at Olive’s school I was actively avoiding other parents. This was in part due to the fact that I was wearing a tight tank in place of a bra because I needed to do laundry and also that we hadn’t planned to attend. But it bothered me that my default mode: the one that I use to walk around the world most of the time, can not tolerate too much contact with others. Today, I’m happy to report, my hair looks really good.
Finally, as I’ve come to see where the world has been turning, and found myself sometimes on the slippery edge, I can understand that it’s not the vinegar that I needed to improve my hairstyle, though it did one of the tricks. I also needed a quiet apartment, access to the internet, a bathtub, a shower and most importantly TIME. Time that I was willing to pull away from everything that claimed its stake in my interests and the self worth to invest it back in myself. And as probably all of you reading this know, SEPTEMBER HAS BEEN ONE INSANE MONTH.
One time, back in the beginning of September, when I thought that this mattered, I made an appointment for a bang trim in Oakland. It was a good thing I did because my friend was also in town so we got to have lunch, and also to wander around a bookstore that I saw, like a game-level carrot, was set to open the last time I went for a haircut in Oakland, which was at the start of the summer. Then, with the weather full of promise, a person on a ladder hung a little sign on a small storefront. “WOMB HOUSE BOOKS,” read the sign and I thought, how beautiful, a bookstore that knows what comfort books are. This trip, the bookstore was open and I wandered in.
Almost immediately, I had an incredibly candid conversation about mothering, marriage and birth with the other two people there. It was just the three of us in the small shop and after asking who had read what and also whether they liked it and why the conversation turned to second children, which is something that I do not have and neither did one of the others. The third person does and she said, mostly unprompted, that if she had known about abortion before she had had her second child she would not have had one. I stared at her silently, trying to reconcile our place, her profile, her age–which she had already shared–with what she just said. I know, she said, I grew up under a rock (which wasn’t exactly the words that she used–what she said had a darker tone).
When I regained my composure I said that it was a very vulnerable thing to say and also that I think most people with children might say something similar: that they loved their kids dearly but if they had had any idea how hard it would be that they probably would have decided differently. I was simultaneously flipping through a copy of Matrescence by Lucy Jones, which I immediately felt was a book I should buy and read but knew that I wouldn’t.The person with two kids said it was great and I admitted that I had a feeling it contained things I felt I wasn’t ready to hear.
The other person at the store said the same: that any reminder of post-partum, while undoubtedly correct, was a chapter of her life she at this point didn’t feel inclined to revisit. She meant it not metaphorically although we also debated whether having a child when the first is already eight is entirely crazy or not crazy. I said that the word crazy ought to be defined, though I had also just used it.
For instance, I said, referring back to the book: do you need to read the “Intensive Parenting” chapter? She looked a bit unclear about what I meant so then I said: I mean early parenting was crazy for me because my approach was crazy.
We talked about the decision to have a second kid some more and how we both had felt so acutely DURING the first two years of child raising that it was so hard that we could not possibly fathom doing it again. Even the fantasy of two kids (they’d play together) could not survive the brutal reality we faced.
Simultaneously, we agreed that having had access to a book like this while going through the first two years would have been invaluable. Though who knows if we would have read it.
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