Braiding hair, feeling feelings

Two things I'm not sure I ever learned to do. Yes, it's another post on girlhood, but not like that.

I love my mother very much, but I sometimes wonder if she ever actually taught me how to be a woman. Of course she did— what the fuck does it mean to be a woman anyway? It’s not anything she could have taught me. But growing up girlhood was both a familiar friend and something foreign to me. Something always beyond my reach.

For my mother it wasn’t sharing in the ritual of hair braiding or teaching me to shave my legs— It was how to keep a brave face. It wasn’t how to cook or how to fold a fitted sheet (though I’d love to know how—) It was how to hide your tears, how to be a beacon of strength.

For some, girlhood is a shared act—It’s a commune. But my mother raised islands.

And she didn’t do it alone. I remember growing up with a village of people who loved me. I had a great childhood, truthfully. I was still lonely. I think it was something I was born with. My sister too.

Anyway, back to my mother—

She knows when to be soft and gentle. She would swirl her middle and index finger in circles on my forearm and scratch her acrylics on my back until I fell asleep. She’d squeeze my hand three times to tell me she loved me. But on the surface she means business. I associate her with heels clacking on the tile, of Tommy Muegler’s Angel perfume.

My mother carries a sword and she knows when to wield it.

But I’ve seen her cry. I’ve seen her cry while she looks me dead in the eyes and denies it. I forget that we were once just girls together. That she was nearly my current age when my older sister was born.

I wrote this while staring at the waves in Assateague Island. My friend was planning on visiting her sick mother, and I started to think about my own. Our friend Kate took this picture of a wild horse family.

And here I am a nearly 30-year-old child and it’s both our first time being alive. I see myself in her even though we look nothing alike. And I want to scream for the both of us, two islands.

I want to braid each other’s hair.

But my mother never taught me and her mother never taught her. I know girlhood isn’t so simple— but what if it is? What if for a moment we existed as one? I know a French braid wouldn’t take away the loneliness I was born with, but maybe it would help.

So what if we can’t talk about our feelings? Maybe we’d learn about each other through osmosis—tuck our secrets into the plaits of the other’s braid.

“There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

My mother gave me everything, but what we really need, we cannot give each other.

Sometimes I’m 13 years old again wishing I could sit in a circle and braid hair with my misfit friends. Wishing that my life wasn’t a series of different islands I lived on, but a community. How do I mesh all versions of myself and the lives she’s constructed? How do I balance friend and lover and mother and sister and aunt? How do I be a woman who belongs?

I wonder if my mother feels lonely despite being surrounded by love. Would I be able to hold her like she has once held me?

Does she feel held by the people around her? Or is she doing all the holding?

Could we talk about it over nail polish and French braids? It doesn’t sound like something either of us would ever do.

But in a different universe, we are girls together and we are braiding our hair and we aren’t ever lonely. We skip rocks and we make friendship bracelets. We let down our guards.

But instead, we tend to our separate gardens. We keep a straight face. We share meals and find sustenance on our private islands. I don’t know what’s in hers and she doesn’t know what’s in mine. But hopefully, we can share our harvests.

“It will take you long, lonely years, but one day you will grow tired. Tired of boys, tired of contempt, and then where will you be? All these girls around you with their stories and their lives, the solace of one another, and you will be as far away from them as an anthropologist among a foreign people, curious but unable to make contact. Have faith: you will learn.”
― Sarah McCarry, Here We Are

And so I’m learning what it means for me to be a woman in the world the same way my mother and my sister and my aunts and my grandmother are. Because it’s all our first time living. We should go easy on each other.