Beautiful Girls

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The problem was an infected earlobe.

Sasha, my 13-year-old daughter, had been diligent about swabbing the new piercing twice a day, but the air is full of germs, and somehow one of them had crept inside. Now the ear throbbed scarlet, and a lymph node had swollen just behind it, an unforgiving pea beneath the satiny skin of her neck.

The doctor was not Sasha’s regular pediatrician, but a warm and competent partner in the cozy suburban practice. She wiggled the earring from its hotbed of infection, while my stoic daughter held back tears and my partner winced in empathetic pain. Then Dr. B. prescribed an oral antibiotic and a prescription cream.

The visit was over, nothing left to do but grab coats and write a check for the co-pay, when the doc called out, “She’s beautiful…does her daddy lock her in the closet on weekends?”

Suddenly, we had a new problem, far more inflamed and resistant than the pinkly painful earlobe. There is no daddy in our family. Closets aplenty, but we’d spent years breaking out of those, thank you very much. The only things closeted in our house were winter coats and warped umbrellas.

You could write off the incident as a moment’s thoughtlessness, one of those times when the ancestral brain overrides all rational filters. Except the comment was no fluke. Just a few days earlier, my cousin had said, nodding in Sasha’s direction: “She’s gorgeous. You guys better get a shotgun.”

And the day before that, in the moments immediately following Sasha’s bat mitzvah, during which she had chanted words of Torah and spoken eloquently of “everyday miracles,” my mother’s boss offered similar caution. “She’s a beauty. Better lock that one in the closet.”

How do I even begin to unpack these remarks, let alone respond to them? What I said to my mother’s boss was, “We don’t believe in locking kids in closets. We believe in teaching them to manage the world.” Humorless. Preachy. What my best friends later called “a classic 1980s feminist response.”

So, okay, how about humor? I wish I’d told my cousin, the one who recommended we arm ourselves to preserve our daughter’s innocence, “Yeah, we’ll put that shotgun on the shopping list, along with a chastity belt and a windowless tower.” And oh, for the presence of mind to lob the good doctor a snappy rejoinder: “Lock her up on weekends? Gosh…don’t you think that would be…child abuse?”

Here’s the truth: My daughter is indeed beautiful. And smart. And tough. And it enrages me when acquaintances, colleagues and strangers in the food co-op see only one aspect of her gorgeous complexity, then feel entitled to say something Medieval about it.

On Sasha’s birth announcement, we quoted Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” And fierce she was, even at one hour old and less than six pounds, when she did a one-armed push-up in her hospital isolette. At three weeks, she flipped herself from tummy to back with a torque of her tiny legs and an exertion of sheer will.

Fast-forward 13 years. Late on the night of her bat mitzvah, I found Sasha doing push-ups, barefoot in her silver party dress, on the carpet outside the synagogue’s social hall. Some nights, between face-washing and tooth-brushing, she hangs upside-down on the pull-up bar that is bolted into the bedroom doorway, her fleece pajama shirt bunched to reveal abs hard as cedar.

My daughter loves a good gel manicure and likes to fringe her ice-blue eyes with dark mascara. She also likes to argue, arm-wrestle and run a mile in less than eight minutes. When my partner, Elissa, explained what the doctor meant by her unfortunate remark, Sasha declared, “No one’s going to touch me unless I want them to!”

So when people suggest we keep Sasha under lock and key, they’re grossly underestimating her strength, ingenuity and pluck. But that’s not all they’re saying. Embedded in those remarks are centuries of poisonous myth: Beauty is dangerous. Women are helpless. Men are wolves. Parents (fathers, especially) must guard their daughters’ sexuality by any means necessary. And of course, there’s the assumption that she’s straight.

It would be laughable, except that it’s a short walk from those deep-seated beliefs to cultures where daughters are forbidden to read and wives are forbidden to drive, where girls suffer painful genital mutilation because their sexual pleasure is so suspect and their virginity so prized.

But my daughter isn’t being raised in Afghanistan or Somalia. She’s growing up in a progressive pocket of Philadelphia in 2014, a century and place teeming with strong, funny, competent women and men who call themselves feminists. Why, then, these retro words from the mouths of people—including a female pediatrician, for heaven’s sake—who certainly should know better?

Old stories take a long time to wither and die. The image of beauty bespoiled is a potent one. In a culture that sometimes feels as though it’s spinning out of control—Sexting! Online pedophiles! Thongs marketed to pre-teens!—maybe the sequestered adolescent or the shotgun-wielding papa is an appealing trope.

But not where I live. So, no, we will not be installing a padlock on Sasha’s bedroom door. No rifle on my shoulder as she strides down the front walk to meet her sweetheart.

Yes, the world of social and sexual interaction is rife with risk (chlamydia, pregnancy, almost-guaranteed heartbreak), but it’s not my job, as a parent, to police Sasha’s journey. It’s my job to help her learn tools to navigate on her own: Audacity. Self-regard. Candor. Communication. It’s my obligation to share every story I know about girls and women—stories from mythology and Torah and history, stories to critique and stories to admire. True ones, too, from Elissa’s life and mine, about times we said yes and times we said no and with whom and what happened next and how it all felt.

And this: When I was a teenager, my mother passed along the words of her grandmother, Ethel, a woman always described in family anecdotes as “a feminist before her time.” Ethel ran the business side of the bakery she and her husband owned in Philadelphia; she took a train to Chicago alone to visit relatives. And she advised her granddaughters, in salty Yiddish, that if a guy got fresh, they should “varfn im inem yam un pishn arayn zayn oyer.” Throw him in the ocean and pee in his ear.

Now, there’s an idea.

About the Author: Anndee Hochman is the author of Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home, a collection of essays, and Anatomies, a book of short fiction. She writes about family health, the arts, and spiritual life and community for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Want to read more thought-provoking essays? Subscribe to Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and see why we’ve been receiving awards for literary excellence since 2000.

By Anndee Hochman

“Ama, you should grow your hair long,” my 11-year-old daughter Sasha says, watching me in the fogged mirror over the sink, her round brush paused mid-stroke. I shake my head like a terrier, scattering warm droplets. Then I reach around her—it’s small, this bathroom—to the shelf where Elissa and I keep the tools of our pragmatic grooming routines: mint dental floss, paraben-free deodorant, contact lens solution, a tweezer to tug the occasional wayward hair from one another’s chins.

I rake my fingers through my short, damp hair, fluffing it with a dab of green gel—the bargain brand, $3.99 with my Acme supercard—to keep my curls standing at shiny attention for the next fifteen hours. Sasha continues to brush her own tupelo-honey tresses, like some Victorian heroine, 100 daily strokes in pursuit of radiance and contentment.

“If I grew my hair long, it would be a mess,” I say. “A fuzzy, tangled mess. C’mon, you’ve seen the pictures.”

I’m thinking of a photo snapped in the courtyard of Trumbull College my sophomore year. I’m wearing the khaki-colored sack I favored in those days to hide my body’s bulges—overalls cut loosely through the thighs and hips, cinched at each shoulder with a strap poked through a buttonhole and then double-knotted. My round cheeks are framed—no, more like swallowed—in a cloud of wild, coal-colored frizz. It looks like a long-haired animal, in shedding season, has draped itself miserably over my head.

I am not going back. I am not going back to Barry Leonard, Crimper, circa 1975, where Barry himself, rayon shirt unbuttoned nearly to his copper belt buckle, stands behind my chair, comb in one hand and mournful look in his limpid brown eyes. “Such hair. Such texture. Some day you will just let it be,” he says, lifting one thick, wavy section. Women in hot pants serve Chardonnay and brie to waiting customers; a white shag carpet hugs the walls. Pink lava lamps undulate on the reception desk.

My mother is paying Barry Leonard $25—a lot, at the time—to be one more adult telling me what I should or shouldn’t do, insisting that today’s stinging regret will, eventually, morph to gratitude. I really don’t care. I am 13 and I want straight hair like Cher, like Karen Carpenter, like Lise Abbott, the tallest and most stunning girl in my class. “Please just blow-dry it,” I say. I can see myself in the infinite mirrors, endless tunnel of shaggy-haired Anndees, all of them lock-jawed with impatience. My mother, complimentary wine in hand, fades toward the carpeted wall. Barry Leonard looks as if he might cry. The blow dryer roars, and he pulls a hank of my hair taut with the wire brush, lashing it over and under, over and under, with electric heat.

I stopped trying to straighten my hair at 16, around the time Josh and I began making out on the black leather couch in his father’s study. I’d like to say it happened in this order: I threw away the giant rollers, unplugged the blow dryer and, with a joyful, newly liberated spirit, attracted my first real boyfriend. But I think it was really the other way around: Josh gave me a stuffed koala bear, wrote cards in barely legible print saying I was pretty, and his sheepish affections buoyed my confidence enough to stop fighting my natural instincts—or, at least, the natural instincts of my hair. Josh managed to blaze a path through the tangle; his tongue found my earlobe, and he held my curls when we kissed.

Fast-forward eleven years. I live in Oregon, I kiss girls—including the one who will become my life partner—and, one impulsive afternoon, I ask Mary Newcomer at the 37^th Street Salon to cut my hair short. Really short, I tell her, making a chop-chop motion around my ears. I watch as eight-inch squiggles, threaded with gray, tumble to the floor.

My mother, when she sees me a month later, will think I have done this because I’m a lesbian; short hair goes with the ripped jeans, second piercing in the left ear and requisite copy of Sinister Wisdom on the bookshelf. She’s worried: what next? A motorcycle? A labrys tattoo on my left hip? But she’ll be wrong. I’m not cutting off my hair in order to join the club. What I see in the mirror as wavy skeins fall from Mary’s shears is this: a woman who no longer needs to hide in a khaki sack or a helmet of hair.

Yes, that was me in Barry Leonard’s salon chair, crackling with want, cringing in self-mortification. Me, blistering my forehead with blow-dryers. Me, staggering through freshman year on a diet of coffee and Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies. That was me, at war with my hair, with myself, until—gradually, finally, blessedly—I grew up and made peace. Such hair. Such texture. Let her be.

Fast-forward once again. Sasha wants contact lenses and high-heeled sandals and permission to wear pink lipstick out of the house. She wants to look like the girls in the Justice clothing catalogue, willow-legged and flirty in their flounced skirts. We compromise and negotiate. We give in on lip gloss, stand firm on the strappy heels, promise contacts when she turns 13. She rolls her eyes. We raise our voices. And each Friday night, we lay our palms on her silken head and whisper: “Hayei asher ti-yih, vehayi b’rucha, b’asher ti-yih. Be who you are, and may you be blessed in all that you are.”

She can barely tolerate our murmured blessing—”Stop. You’re messing up my hair,” she hisses before we’re finished—and I know, in the end, we can do only what my mother did—fade toward the wall, witnesses as Sasha finds her way.

Back to the present, our steamy little bathroom. “If you grew your hair long,” Sasha muses, “you could put it in a high ponytail—look, Ama, like this—and tie it with a pink ribbon. It would be so cute. I want you to have long hair. Did you ever? I’m going to let mine grow, down to here, and then get it layered…Will you make me a ponytail? Really tight. It’s bumpy on top; I don’t want it bumpy on top. Make it so there aren’t any little strands sticking out? No, not like that! Why won’t that piece tuck in? I. HATE. MY. HAIR!”

“I know, sweetie.” But I’ve moved on, my one-minute beauty routine is wrapped up for the day. I poke earrings through my lobes, shrug a silver bracelet onto my wrist, grab socks from the basket in the corner. Sasha continues brushing her hair, alternately beaming and scowling at herself in the mirror, trying unsuccessfully to tame the wild, electric strands.

Want to read more thought-provoking essays? Subscribe to Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and see why we’ve been receiving awards for literary excellence since 2000.

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Hair Today Gone Tomorrow