Hair therapy session....

I tend to have bad self esteem. I hope and pray that this is something that my girls do not get from me as they become older. Most recently I mentioned that I had some low lites put in to darken up my hair for fall. I went to work feeling all confident, loving the new hair, and I spent the rest of my day hearing from a lot of people how they hated it. OUCH. Ok, so not everyone hated the hair, I did get some compliements, but the negative feed back was harsh. It didn't help matters that when I came home my mom appeared to not be a fan either. I may or may not have snapped at her.

I already posted the picture, but here it is again for my blog lurkers:

I still really like it. The funny thing is, this is pretty much what my hair color is naturally. I was a blonde baby/girl, and over the years my hair has darkened some, and I have some natural red in the front that I have worked hard at bleaching the hoo hoo out of. So I think this is pretty much the natural color minus the red.

So why I am harping so much about just hair? I tend to have some bad hair history. For starters I spent much of my early child hood years with pixi short hair for reasons only my mom could explain. Ok so I may have gotten into the scissors when I was 5, but she kept my hair short and it wasn't pretty. I straight up looked like a boy.

Then there were the perm years....My parents allowed my grandma to perm my hair a few times. Hilarious I esure you. However, my mom took me to hair dresser and allowed me to get a professional perm when I was in the 6th grade which leads me to exhibit A: the gerri curl:

Oh yes the gerri curl... aka the spirtal perm. Sadly this was probably a good hair day, because I didn't understand that you couldn't brush curls, so it usually looked like a frizzy poofy mess. I was called a poodle pretty much every single day at school.

By summer the curl had relaxed a great deal, and I spent every day in the pool in chlorine or on the baseball field. My hair turned snow white from the sun and chemicals. Summer ended and 7th grade began, and I began the ugliest year of my entire life. There is nothing harder then being 13 and looking like this:

Wow. Oh how this picture scares me. By the time the fall school pictures were taken, some of my natural hair was coming back in that wasn't damanged from the perm and it was really dark compared to the white hair from the pool/sun. Pretty much everyone in my grade told me on a daily basis that I was ugly, and accused me of bleaching my hair because I had janky hair and roots, and braces. Looking back at this picture I can understand why people said what they did. But I pinky promise each of you, I DID NOT BLEACH MY HAIR. It was the freaking pool and sun.

Kids are mean, and meaner if you don't fit into the typical mold. I attended a very nice private school during these wonderful ugly years, and looking like this and not having the latest and greatest clothes didn't help. I posted long ago about being teased for having fake birkenstocks. Yepp same school. I don't have an 8th grade picure for you, but in 8th grade I started to understand what brands were cool, and got my act together with hair and makeup. I actually remember in 8th grade when school started that a group of my friends sat me down and told me that I was actually looking pretty, and one guy said "yes you looked like a total dog last year". Yikes. I still spent that year insecure, and it may sound silly but those middle school years set up a lifetime of insecurity and body image issues. If I lost a boyfriend or had a fight with a friend I felt it was because it was because I wasn't pretty or cool enough. I hated this school, and acted out and begged my parents to get me out of there. My parents even to this day felt that this school walked on water and that I should have stayed. Academically it is a great place, but they just don't understand what I went through. One thing that I did do well was play sports. I had good coordination, and it didn't matter on a baeball field, field hockey field, or volley ball court what I looked like, as long as I could play well. I couldn't concentrate in the classroom with dealing with worrying about picked on, but on the field noone would mess with me.

So when someone talks smack about my hair, or my weight, etc it just makes me die a little inside.

On a side note, this wonderful school I went to as a middle schooler, has since expanded and has a elementry program now. We have to make a choice on schools here soon for my oldest for next year, and my husband thinks it would be swell if she could go there. I have some serious mixed feelings about this, especially since I have seen that some of those wonderful peers of mine that were mean are teachers there now.