My Husband’s White Mistress Cut Our Black Daughter’s Hair Without My Consent

Not even close to okay.

Black hair is one of those subjects that is immediately understood by Black people as a thing but requires a full explanation for most others. It’s not just about the experience of sitting in the hair salon deep in the tea with the other women or whether the hair is fake or real, weave or lace-front, but more about the culture of being Black.

It’s about African history and identity and I didn’t always get it.

So when my now ex-husband’s white mistress called to tell me that she had cut my 8-year-old daughter’s hair, I was speechless.

Who does that? She had violated every unwritten rule about side chicks and took the extra bold step of violating my daughter’s heritage.

Black hair vs. good hair

My daughter already had a complex about her hair like so many Black girls, because it didn’t look like her friends’ hair in her predominantly white elementary school. Her friends were fascinated by it, staring at it and touching it the way you might run your hand over the hide of an animal you’ve never had the opportunity to come in contact with before.

Black hair, as opposed to “good hair” is wiry and curly and requires an entirely different approach than white hair or other good hair ethnicities. Asian hair is popular in the salons we frequent and if you have the money to drop, Malaysian hair is the gold standard in good hair.

Black hair needs products made specifically for natural kinky hair, it needs protective styles to keep it healthy, and it does not lend itself well to a haphazard sexy bun or an impromptu swim at the pool. That sort of behavior is left to good hair, easy hair.

Black hair care is a learned skill

That skill is usually passed down from Black woman to Black woman in families and it begins quite young. Black hair has to be nurtured constantly so that eventually Black girls become Black women who know how to care for their hair.

She had my husband and now she wanted my daughter’s adoration?

The fact that I couldn’t do my own daughter’s hair was a source of deep shame and embarrassment for me. I knew she deserved better and I berated myself for not taking the time to learn.

So when the woman who was sleeping with my husband cut and styled my daughter’s hair, something I hadn’t been able to do, it was a knife in my gut.

She had my husband and now she wanted my daughter’s adoration?

I’ll admit, I also felt shame that I had briefly entertained the idea that my daughter would love this woman more than me because she had made her look pretty.

I had passed all the wrong lessons down to my daughter by not taking the time to learn how to care for her hair.

Black hair takes a village

I usually washed my daughter’s hair which in itself was a complete ordeal. She was what Black people call “tender-headed,” screaming and carrying on each time I tried to get a comb through her thick hair. After a while, I’ll admit I would throw it up in a ponytail half brushed, and call it a day.

When it got really bad, my ex-husband’s sister, Terri, would come over to our house with her old-fashioned metal hot comb and curling iron mumbling through the hair clips sticking out of her mouth, “this what happen when you marry high yellow. She don’t know how to do the child’s hair. I can’t keep coming over here all the time. Lucky I love my niece.”

My sister-in-law knew I was Black but my light skin tone made me “bougie,” stuck up, and useless when it came to doing my daughter’s hair.

“Why can’t we use my mommy’s curling iron?”

My daughter hated seeing those instruments of hair torture come out of her aunt’s “hair bag.”

Terri’s eyes would roll as far back in her head as they could get while she repeated the same thing she always said when asked this: “Baby, these are the same hair tools your Grandma used on my hair when I was little. You don’t need no electricity for our hair.”

No, but you did need to stand next to the stove and not move while both pieces were heated over the burner.

I always wondered why those tools were made with wooden handles. You could tell they had seen more than a few stovetops.

The morning the mistress called me, I hung up the phone embarrassed, ashamed, and full of guilt for not trying harder to be a better Black woman.

My daughter needed to know what it meant to have Black hair, what it meant to be Black.

My marriage was over and it needed to be, that much was true, but my husband was living with a woman who was so small as to use my daughter’s heritage, her cultural roots, her very identity as a Black girl, to shame me.

And I had handed her the very ammunition with which to do so.

But she was right, something needed to be done. My daughter needed to know what it meant to have Black hair, what it meant to be Black.

But it would come from me once I learned it for myself.

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