Thanks for Complimenting My Hair, But It’s Not My Identity

You are more than your best feature (or your worst)

Photo by kyle smith on Unsplash

I felt the women behind me in the bus slip a finger up my ringlet. I turned around and smiled at her. She was old and I was in a developing country where they don’t see a lot of people with hair like mine. I’d already been handled, stroked, and squeezed quite a few times by similar old ladies in the three weeks I’d been there — I was getting used to it.

She smiled back and mumbled something I didn’t understand.

“She says, you like a ghost with a young woman’s face but golden hair,” my friend translated. “She wanted to touch you to see if you’re real.”

This year, my daughter was in a shop in our local town and an old lady smiled at her. “Can I touch your hair?” she asked.

“I guess,” my daughter replied.

When she mentioned it later on to me, I told her about the lady on the bus. “People don’t see hair like ours a lot but you can say no, okay.”

The touching is a rare thing (thank goodness) but my daughter and I get a lot of comments on our hair. It’s lovely when people offer compliments, it’s not the compliments that are the problem, but I get worried about all that focus on one feature, especially for women.