MY DECADES-LONG JOURNEY TO CURLS

"My hair's growth these years, much like mine, has been stunningly imperfect."

- ANJA TYSON

The author with her daughter, Matilda.

When my daughter was 5—an age many parents will recognize as the peak of their children’s vulnerability to the Disney industrial complex—she started asking me to straighten her beautiful curly hair. A girl in her pre-K class had the sort of shiny cornsilk hair that is particularly appealing to young girls; a kind of hair my daughter ironically portmanteau’d into “belong” (blonde and long), and increasingly requested to emulate with each passing day.

“Your hair is beautiful the way it is, my love,” rolled out of my mouth with regularity, and I went about my days buying up little accoutrements that might support this thesis. A large poster of Diana Ross for her bedroom wall. Hot pink Denman brushes. Late ’80s beaded hair ties from Goody, just like the ones from my childhood, which slide swiftly out of straight hair but cling lovingly, assuringly, to textured hair.

Because yes, as a woman of biracial white and Afro– Caribbean lineage, my hair is also extremely curly. Not that my daughter would have known this at the time. The hours of labor and management that I put toward beating it into straight, limp submission each week masked even the slightest hint of texture, and she—who will be 11 years old this fall—had no idea I had been performing this ritual on myself since almost exactly her age.

Soon after my daughter began asking for straightened hair, Tracee Ellis Ross launched the haircare line Pattern. Earlier that year, we had watched Mixed-ish together, a sort of TV–bonding attempt to help my daughter understand what it was like to grow up mixed race before the internet.