Leave my hair alone!

I need to rant! I tend not to cut around the bush and say out loud what everybody else is thinking. That doesn't always come in my favour but I've learnt not to care.
I have no problem telling people to keep their narrow-minded and critical opinions to themselves or to shove them where the sun don't shine! Well, that is to everybody else but my mother. 
At the contrary to her eldest child (me); my mum tend to keep things to heart.
Therefore, you need to be extremely careful when you say something to her; even if she is the one you has inadvertently instigated the fight.
However, this time she attacked something very dear to me: my hair.


It has been 6 months and 2 weeks since my BC and I am still rocking a TWA.
I wish my hair would grow faster but since there is not much I can do about it I've decided to enjoy this stage and simply let it be.
My mum's answer to this is: "You need to weave you hair. You cannot keep going to work looking like a village girl. People - black and white alike - will laugh at you".
What am I supposed to answer to that?


Anybody else would have received a gigantic F..K OFF from me as well as lecture on how I refuse to let society impose on me its definition of beauty.
Obviously this scenario is simply unplayable with my mum. So, I have been keeping tight-lipped.


Despite my frustration, I feel some sympathy towards her.
I strongly believe that her reaction is due to the strong and deep desire to fit in she must have felt for the majority of her life. 


My mum was born in 1956 in West Africa and came to live in France when she was 19-years-old. She endured her fair share of hardship and simply refuses to talk about the past. I don't know anything about my mum's life before she became 'mum'.
What was life really like for her and for Black immigrants in general in the late 1970s in France and in Europe?
How did they live? How did they adapt? Did they ever felt like they fitted in with White Europeans? Did they have to repress their identity? 

What happened back then for my mum to feel ashamed of her hair today?


So many questions which need answering that I sometimes wonder if the mistakes of the past will ever stop affecting our present and destroying our future...


Vanessa
XOXO



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