Parents, appearance, and opinions
This is a repost blog.
Original posts by Letter Writer #688 at Captain Awkward. Only the letter writer’s content is reproduced here; to read Captain Awkward’s advice, click through to original links.
13 Apr 2015: #688: Parents, appearance, and opinions
Hi Awkward team,
Last fall, I decided to get an undercut — long hair with a side
shave — and I love it! It looks super cute on me and it feels really
good to be able to signal my queerness in an additional way. When I went
home for Christmas, my mother was aghast. I said that it was my hair, I
liked it, and she was welcome to cut her hair in whatever way she chose.
She pouted and mumbled something about how at least it wasn’t a tattoo.
(To which I responded, I reserve the right to do that if I want to,
too.) I thought this would be the end of it, but almost every time I’ve
talked to her since, we have this “conversation”:
Mom: [out of nowhere] I just want you to know your hair will
grow back.
Me: …. I’m aware? But I like it this way, and I’m going to
keep it like this for a while.
And then she spends a while trying to convince me that I am
going to get tired of the maintenance or I’m going to find that’s it’s
not professional enough.
I don’t know exactly what her deal is, but it doesn’t matter, because I am super tired of talking about it. I’m 30! It’s my hair!
What’s a good script to squash this conversation the next time it comes up?
Sincerely,
At Least She’s Not Bugging Me About Grandkids This
Week
5 January 2017: UPDATE on an Open Thread
I’m LW 688 aka “My mom hates my haircut!”
I found everyone’s comments INCREDIBLY validating.
The next time I was on the phone with my mom, she brought up my hair again, and I said, “I don’t want to talk about my haircut.” She was stunned into silence, and then changed the subject. I was like, OH MY GOD, is it really that easy?????? (It was not). At the end of the conversation, she was like, “I just want to leave you with this wisdom: You’re gay, and that’s not going to change, but you can still be cute.”
And I was like, “…I AM cute, but the way that I look and feel cute as a gay woman is different than if I were a straight woman.”
And she said, “Well, when does it stop being different?”
I said, “Mom, it’s always going to be different.”
She had one more extinction burst via text message, which I did not respond to. But then she actually did stop bugging me about my hair! This root issue here — my mom wanting me to look more feminine / not gay / her definition of cute — has not been solved, and it has definitely popped up in other ways ( the latest being around clothing). It does kind of feel like whack-a-mole, though I feel like I’m getting better at whacking, and I think that’s a success!
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