Girl Adoptees and Hair That Was Shorter Than They Liked. What's the Story Here?

Granted, mothers and daughters historically often fight about hair. But when I started to ask other female adoptees about their experience with their mothers and hair, the response was loud. “She cut my hair so short! She didn’t know what to do with it,” is something I heard again and again, along with “People thought I was a boy, and I hated it.”

I googled “mothers and their daughter’s hair”, and I found a Huff Post article by Amy Wruble called “What is it With Mothers, Daughters, and Hair?” In it she wrote about her motives behind wanting Viv’s—her (biological) daughter’s—(longish) hair to be neatly brushed.

Hair is such a hot button for mothers and daughters. Even my own mom, generous with compliments, saves her criticisms for my 'do. ("You forgot to comb the back. It looks like a rat's nest! And did you have to go quite so blonde this time?) How could I ever break the cycle? 

I couldn't expect help from Viv. She's 2. I had to analyze my own motives. Why was I so intense about something to trivial? 

It's just good hygiene, I rationalized. Part of my mom job is to keep Viv clean and tidy. Plus, I like looking at her sweet face, all of it, uncovered by shag. But was there another, more sinister motive at work? Could it be that I like basking in the reflected glow of my daughter's appearance? Surely, when someone stops on the street to tell me how cute she is (which has more to do with the light inside her than any outfit or hairstyle I could dream up), I beam with pride and say, "Thank you," as though it's all my doing. I don't squirm and deflect the way I might if someone complimented my outfit (oh, this old thing?). I eat it up. Plus, her dazzling presence takes all the pressure off me to lose the baby weight, shower or take care of myself. Nobody's looking at me when I'm traveling with cute. So, the least my little show pony could do is let me brush her hair! 

Or, I could try to enjoy this oh-so-brief period of her life in which my daughter is totally unselfconscious. She's not trying to look like a princess or some girl in her class or a picture in a magazine. She's just being her wild-haired self. And that's beautiful.

This is the part that really caught my attention:

Part of my mom job is to keep Viv clean and tidy. Plus, I like looking at her sweet face, all of it, uncovered by shag. But was there another, more sinister motive at work? Could it be that I like basking in the reflected glow of my daughter's appearance? Surely, when someone stops on the street to tell me how cute she is (which has more to do with the light inside her than any outfit or hairstyle I could dream up), I beam with pride and say, "Thank you," as though it's all my doing.

I wonder. If our hair is different from our (adoptive) mother’s hair, is one way to deny the difference between us, to try to avoid the person in line at the grocery store asking, Where did she get that hair? to just cut the hair of your girl child short?

I also wonder if, for mothers who had to deal with infertility, cutting a girl child’s hair is a way of taking femininity away from the child, for, subconsciously, the mother might think, “If I can’t feel fully female, then neither can you”? I’m not saying that the mother is intentionally cruel. I’m suggesting pain that goes undiscussed and is buried by the “joy” of adoption, will rear its head in strange ways.

I wonder about control, about the parallel fear that adoptive mothers might have that—just as adoptees often fear the mother will disappear—one day someone would take their child away from them or that the child would disappear. Is holding on to the power of the length of their child’s hair a way to feel in control, to mark their territory, to help “disappear” the girl into something else?

To get even darker, the fact is that when you bring a girl child into a house with a mother and a father, you have two females who are not blood related to the man. You do the math.

Talking about the really sticky stuff of adoption is so complicated and nuanced, and it’s easiest to say really adoptees are no different than biological children, and things such as those I have written about here are the result of an over-active imagination.

But I don’t think it’s true.

And truths that are buried or ignored turn into poison, sickness, and, sometimes, death.

So we might as well talk about it.

Just to stay alive.

And to remember that our hair has stories that are ours, and stories are roots, and roots are life.

(The baby picture is of me. I didn’t have any of the ones when I was a little kid, but I wanted to be included!)

If you would like your photo included in this blog, email it to me at anneheffron@gmail.com. If you sent me a photo and I did not include it, it was my mistake. Please write to me and let me know.