July 14, 2010
Alice hates brushing her hair because it feels so painful to her, and it’s taken a couple years for us to develop a nightly detangler spraying and brushing ritual in NYC. But, we dropped that ritual once we left NYC, feeling like lazy vacationers. Soon Alice developed a rat’s nest of a knot at the back of her that was the biggest we’d seen. After a while she was so nervous about getting it brushed out that she refused for anyone to brush it, sobbing when I tried once, insisting on waiting til Nanny came a couple weeks later.
One day in Bali, one of the many Balinese beach vendors yelled that she could braid Alice’s hair “very cheap, very cheap.” She clearly hadn’t taken a good long look at the nest. After much coaxing and negotiation over lunch, Alice returned to the braider who immediately started negotiating a more expensive price once she saw the rat’s nest. The braider called in a friend to help and they both went at the nest with sharp combs and patience, but first they grilled me how I could let my daughter’s hair get to this point. What kind of moms are these American women, they seemed to ask.
But, at least, I wasn’t an Australian mom. The braider said one Australian mom hadn’t been patient with her daughter’s rat’s nest and she just chopped it off with scissors. The Aussie brought her daughter’s butchered long hair in and asked that they repair the hack job by weaving the short into the long hairs for a braid.
Alice beamed from all the protective fussing over her, sitting in her plastic throne overlooking the sea for a full hour of hair work.
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