Leave In Conditioner
- K. Lyte
- Sep 27, 2020
- 3 min read
I’m learning that finding a great leave-in conditioner is key to keep my hair feeling soft and moisturized too!
But speaking of conditioning let’s talk about how conditioned I was, and sort of still am, to how my hair had to be straight like the Europeans even though, I’m AFRICAN American, which means my roots, literally and figuratively, are African first!
You know how brutally honest your family is, especially your children! Well, when they are grown it doesn’t stop.They sort of get more brutal! So my daughter kind of went off on me about how I conditioned her to this ideology. We were talking about how she is rocking her natural hair around the house, and I love it! Her face was meant for it and to me it just shows her natural beauty even more! But when people came over, including an Uber Eats driver just dropping off our food, she couldn’t answer the door without putting a scarf on first cause she didn’t want anyone to see her hair!
I was like, “Babe, seriously????, You can’t just answer the door? You don’t know them and they don’t know you!” She was like, “Mom, it’s your fault! You conditioned me to be like this! All the way back to the stories you told me about my hair when I was a baby!”
Now y’all know that hurt deep, all the way to my soul. But it was so true.
When she was a baby, she had the ring around the head. (You know like the bald spot in the middle back where her hair hadn’t started growing.) I would not let her leave the house without a hat. Every outfit I picked out had a matching hat. And if you took her out and left the hat I was pissed! Even if we were out and it came off I was mad!
I remember my sister saying one time to me, “K, she is a beautiful baby and she is not her hair! That’s is who she is at this moment! Just how God made her!” I heard her but the hard-headed part of me did not listen!
She was her hair! And I spent all of her childhood making sure her hair was always laid. When she got a little older, she always had braids even when I should have let her hair breathe because her edges were weakening. Then, when she was old enough on to go to the shop, the weaves started. My baby girl got her first perm early in life, sometime in elementary school, maybe even kindergarten.
Yes I always and still do know that my baby girl is beautiful but no one would see it if her hair wasn’t straight. Those were my sick and sad thoughts that I forced on my baby girl!
But getting back to being conditioned. That is what I thought about myself, too. I believed the media and commercialism hype. I was conditioned to those thoughts!
I remember when I was first separated from my husband and knew I was going to have to go back on the dating scene. My thoughts were, “Nope, I can’t be natural until I am married again.” Being newly single and having to get back out there, my chances of finding a man, the right man, meant I had to have European looking hair. My pool of choices would be much larger! So I went back to braids and weaves!
I told myself too that it was easier to handle too. Especially with me working out like crazy and sweating really bad in my hair all the time. (I still feel like weaves are easier ) —— We will compare once I really start working out again. I would see all these women with beautiful natural hair and locs! But I would say they have good hair and mine does not and will not look like that. So to each her own.
But I’m here to tell you that I am working on not being a puppet of conditioning anymore. Yes, I love my leave-in conditioner but I am not being conditioned by society’s hype!
I am also going to support my daughter in her journey. I know where she is. I was there up til Rona, honestly! But I will continue to tell her what I should have been telling her before: You are not your hair! You are beautiful, and so is your hair, no matter how you choose to wear it!
Baby girl, I apologize for my part in your conditioning. I’m right here no matter what!
If any of y’all reading this feel this way just remember, God made us exactly how He wanted us, in His image! Own it, claim it and walk in it, with your head held high and smiling! #Winning
Boldly,
Your Girl—K. Lyte
PS. Funny I ran across this video about a mother that is better than I was and is teaching her daughter to love her whole self! Check it out!
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