Fear and Dreads

It's time to say something that has been steadily gnawing at my mind.  It's something that first occurred to me months ago as a passing thought.  It's something I've tried to hide from, ignore, bury deep, cover up, and deny.  It's gone from passing thought to hidden doubt, to mild worry, and is now an all out raging fear that needs to be expressed.  But I haven't said anything, I've soldiered on.  But today, it's time to confess:  I'm worried, concerned, and troubled about the future of my dreads.  They may, in fact be doomed.

I'm frightened, Auntie Em.

This summer, in early July, after adventures in the ocean and chlorinated swimming pools with my nieces and nephews, the rubber bands on my dreads were dissolving into globs of goo seeping into the core of my dreads.  So I stayed up late one night in the dorm room bathroom in Ithaca College while my nephews slept, and I took out the rubber bands, a painful process that involved extracting the now fragile and twisted rubber bands in pieces.  In many places the goo stayed.  I can still find bits of it now, months later.

Right after taking the bands out in early July.  You can see the late night doubt all over my face.  

After washing my hair a few times, I actually liked the way they looked band-free much better.  My hair certainly felt much better without over a hundred rubber bands in it.  Compliments continued to come in from unexpected quarters (people at airports, gas stations, old ladies, etc.), and I thought that all was well.  But about a month after I had taken the bands out, it was pretty clear that the ends, far from dreading up naturally like I had hoped they would, were unraveling instead.  Pretty soon I had about four inches of loose hair.  It became clear that I would need to do something about it. 

Just before redreading the tips in late July.

Of course, that meant that Di and I and Nick-in-her-basement once again spent hours working on my hair.  At the end of another several TV shows and a couple mini-movies, my tips were redreaded and secured once again with bands.  This time I was careful: no pools, which was hard during the month of August. 

Tips all tightened up and incubating in their bands again.

Mid-late August, the tips look were looking secure.  And the bands were starting to get fragile again, it was time to take them out.

But the front always looks best.  That's because that's where my face is.  

After giving the tips a month with bands, on the eve of my three month of dreadiversary, I took out the bands.

Soooo much softer.

Three months strong.  

Now, a little over a week later, I am faced with an unpleasant reality:  my dreads are beginning to unravel again.  Not only that, but now, after three months, there is a veritable swamp of loose hair, some of it in very large chunks. 

The loose hair can supposedly be fixed if I find a microscopic crochet hook and put in another 10-20 hours of labor.  Also, now that the dreads are a few months old, the dread/not dread process is beginning to show.  Some of my dreads have just grown out, with no dreading at the roots.  Others have begun to dread on their own, which is good, but they’re not dreading up cleanly.  My dreads are growing in zig-zags and loops.

This is probably the worst one, but most of them have at least one loop or  zag or both.

Supposedly, if I control the dreading process of the roots by constant maintenance, I can help prevent some of that.  This will involve working on every single dread individually, then rebanding the roots for another month, and hoping that fixes the problem.  I would need to repeat this process with each dread as it needs redoing—probably every few months.  So what I currently have are an inch to two inches of snarled roots forested with loose hair, then some loops and zags and more loose hair, followed by a few inches of solid dread (smooth but scratchy, the way it’s meant to be), and then topped by one to three inches of loose tips.  Here’s a pictorial tour of the way it looks when I’m not trying to hide the problems.  The way it looks is disheartening.  I keep wearing thicker and thicker headbands to try and hide the problems at the roots.  And I don’t know if it’s going to get better.

The harsh reality.

Do you know that problem with roots?  They grow.  They take over.  

This is with a headband.  And it still looks like that.  :(

So now I am forced to acknowledge that my dreads may be doomed.  That's hard to face.  I went into this so committed, so ready to put up with any snags and problems, so mentally prepared to give any necessary time and maintenance my dreads could ask for.  Now, I’m staring down the barrel of probably 20-30 hours of work to get them looking passable again, which may not even matter because the tips may continue to unravel.  Maybe, if I put in another 20 hours blunting the tips, I can halt the unraveling, but that’s a maybe.  I don’t know if I have enough solid dread in my dreads to actually work in all that loose hair and tip without tearing apart the dread I do have. 

When I went into this, I thought that dreading was a drastic enough process to overcome my hair.  You see my hair will always default to classy no matter what I’ve tried to do to it.  I've curled it and permed it and punked it and now dreaded it.  Every single time, my hair will win.  I curl it and it goes back to straight.  I perm it and it gradually loses its curl.  I chop it off and feather it and dye it purple, and it always looked like a mid-30s mom-bob by the end of the day.  Now, I have backcombed and rolled and banded and rebanded and begged it, and it is rebelling against these dreads with all the stubbornness it has.  And it has a lot.  It’s genetic.  My sister has my hair, too, we got it from the matriarchs in our family.  Looking at my mother and her mother I know certain things.  My hair will never go gray, it will always be thick, Pantene Pro-V commercial thick and strong and smooth. 

But that magic hair is destroying my dreads.  If I want to keep my dreads, it will require an all-out war and siege against my hair that I may not be able to win despite my best efforts.  Do I put in another 40-60 hours to champion what may be a losing cause?  Do I enlist my friends’ help again to mount another offense?  Do I acknowledge defeat, and gather friends to put in 20 hours to take out the dreads?  It’s the middle of the school year, so I can’t just shave my head.  Do I apologize to the friends who have given so much time and effort to helping me get this far and take out all their hard work, or do I enlist their help for more hours of painstaking labor in this possibly doomed venture?

Now don’t get me wrong, I love my dreads.  I’ve enjoyed every day with them.  I love having hair that looks the same whether I drive with the windows down on the freeway, spent the night on the couch, wore a bike helmet five miles, camped for days, or any other adventure.  All I have to do is throw on a headband and I’m ready for a date or school.  I love that my hair stopped producing grease to the point where I often forget when the last time I washed my hair, because, although I wash it more than once a week, I once let it go for almost two and noticed no real difference.  I love the way they look on me, especially on the front.  They give my usually flat hair a volume its never had.  I love being the girl with dreads.  I feel like they suit my personality well.  I like the people who come talk to me because of them.  I love how much my students love them.  I have a few friends who hate them, but mostly the response has been positive.  Even my parents and my conservative sister-in-law have told me they like my dreads. 

But my dreads are transforming from the tame, groomed dreads, controlled by the bands I had in the beginning, to a war zone.  I may have won the battle with the initial dreading, but I feel like I’m losing the war.  So how much more time and effort do I put in before I abandon ship?  How long to I hope this is just a dread-phase that will go away after they “mature” a bit more. 

What do I do?