the squibix family blog

Logistics

It seems like there are two ways to dread your hair when you're a white person. One, you can roll them yourself and gradually let them dread over the course of a year. This is the more messy route, and your hair is kind of a long-term project you're working on. The other ways is to pay a professional to backcomb and seriously break apart your hair. It costs something like $300, but then you have the basic shape of dreads in a day, with them looking more like normal tight dreads in 6 weeks.

I'm not a real hippy, so I'd get salon dreads. I hate gradual change.

The other logistical decision is whether to add fake hair extensions in there. The extensions would make the finished hairstyle look fuller, and they'd also enable me to get smaller dreads. White people often have big thick dreads and few of them. I would love thinner dreads and more of them, but it would require the addition of plastic hair. I was really set on getting extensions before I saw them today at the beauty shop. Then all of a sudden I had second thoughts about both the look and the weight of the plastic on my head. Still, I want to look more like Shakira and less like Buckwheat. I don't know, jury's still out.

Why do you want dreads?

There are very few hairstyles you need to defend with an ideological argument, but dreadlocks is one of them. I'd start by saying that first and foremost I think dreadlocks look pretty. I think I would look pretty in dreadlocks. Hairstyles are about vanity foremost, and I wouldn't do something to my hair if I didn't think it would look better than many other alternatives.

But of course that isn't sufficient. Dreadlocks are an identity statement, for good and for ill. I am excited that strangers just meeting a me with dreadlocks might assume some of the following things:

I am more poor than rich. This is true.

I hold liberal to extreme political views. This is also true.

I am a calm person who enjoys chilling out. This is not true, though I wish it was.

They might also assume the following negative things:

I do drugs. This could not be any more untrue. I have nothing against drugs, I just have no desire to spend my time that way. See above re: inability to chill out.

I am dirty. This is sometimes true. I do spend a lot of time with poo-producing children and animals. But mostly I shower, and even with dreads I would wash my head with soap.

To conclude this point, I think dreads are prettier then my normal Fran Drescher looking hair, and the messages they impute are more positive to me than negative.

Yeah, but then you couldn't get a job.

I am not on a professional career track right now. Indeed, I've gone in and out of wanting dreads for almost a decade, but I've never seriously considered doing it because I was, like, trying to get hired or keep a job or whatever. Now that I am raising children and out of the workforce I feel that dreads would be a better expression of my personality then curly hair perpetually pulled back into a ponytail. I don't think I'll have dreads forever; if and when I want to go back to work I'll cut them off and have short hair for a while.

There are more questions this raises, however, because dreads might bring greater public scrutiny to certain choices we've made regarding our financial situation. It's a complicated issue, but I'll try to touch on it quickly. Even though we face pretty big financial challenges, Dan and I still think it's best for me to stay home with the kids rather than trying to return to work. Our ideal situation would be for Dan to get a slightly higher paying job so we could make ends meet with me staying home. Because his current job isn't ideal, we accept assistance to make our bills work out, both from the government in the form of food stamps and heating assistance, and from private charity at our local food pantry. There's this sort of stance one expects from someone taking charity: "Of course I would help myself out of this situation if I could, but I lost my job and then I just keep getting knocked up..." At least, I feel sometimes that I have to justify myself, give a reasonable reason why I'm poor that people would believe (that I don't know how to use birth control) rather than a rationed explanation why I've make certain choices that keep me poor (that I believe raising children in the absence of money is preferable to raising children in the absence of me during the daytime). If you come into a food pantry as a white girl with dreadlocks then it's something different though; you're willfully flying in the face of people who diligently try to find employment. I don't think that's necessarily bad... it's true after all. It's just, I've made a decision to be out of the workforce for the time being, and I wouldn't be able to hide that decision anymore. Dreadlocks would mean that I'm wearing my choices in a way that I can't pretend away. Is that good or bad? I don't know. It's challenging.

There are other little things to consider. Would normal people stop being friends with me? What would the neighbors think? Will Dan ever totally get behind this decision?

Anyway, I think that covers my thought process up to this point. I'm mostly doing this to be pretty and because I want to change my hair, but there's a lot of background stuff to consider. Anyone else have an opinion on this?