Growing Up: Big Hair

Big Hair was another lesson that my mom tried to teach me when I was growing up! She and I had plenty of tearful disagreements in front of the bathroom mirror about the supposed advantage of “teasing” one’s hair. I refused to adopt the Big Hair tradition for years and started begging to do my own hair.

And the challenge began...

Many a morning, Mom would heat up the hot rollers and the curling iron, arm herself with a rat tail comb and a bottle of White Rain hairspray, and offer to “fix” my hair for me. (Some ladies preferred Aqua Net hairspray, but my mom felt that Aqua Net made a better pesticide than a hairspray.) Much to Mom’s chagrin, my hair adamantly refused to be BIG! This was quite a source of embarrassment to my mother, so rather than bear this shame in public, she gave me my first home perm when I was in the seventh grade. 

I remember sitting in a chair in the kitchen with a worn-out bath towel protecting my neck and another one protecting my shoulders while my motivated mother wrapped my mutinous mane around some colorful plastic perm rods. Afterwards, she surrounded my hairline with a long piece of cotton in order to prevent anything from dripping into my eyes, and then she drenched my hair with the menacingly malodorous perm lotion and turned on the kitchen timer. 20 minutes later the timer went off, and the revealing began. For the first time in my life, I had hair which had the ability to be teased into the Big Hair that my mom so admired! I’m not sure how many home perms Mom gave me before she started taking me to hair salons for my perms. I do know that I haven’t had a perm since the early 90s, but I’ll never forget what it was like to get a home perm from my mom in the kitchen when I was in the 7th grade.

Much to my mom’s pride and relief, I willingly adopted BIG hair for a time during the mid to late 80s.

Satisfied that she had accomplished her goal, Mom felt that she could move on to other lessons.

Fortunately, my brother married a lovely lady whose hair quite easily went BIG. Mom seemed more at peace after that. Perhaps, she was confident that her grandchildren would never struggle as I did to achieve the Big Hair that she so admired.