No More Tangles
I can still smell it. The too sweet scent from the pink and yellow spray bottle. No More Tangles, a product my mother treated like a magic elixir, believing that with a spritz and plenty of persistence, my wild and stubbornly tangled long hair could be tamed.
The ritual took place in front of her vanity mirror, where the glare of the bright round bulbs reflected back to me the awkwardness of my own developing body. It was the 1970s, and I was a tween before the term was ever invented. The bottle sat ready on the counter, the label taunting me with a picture of a perfect little girl with perfectly smooth blond hair. The television ads featured the same girl, with her placid voice and docile smile, assuring that with a tiny squirt, combing out tangles could be accomplished without tears. Even as a ten year old I could recognize false marketing.
I hid behind the veil of my hair. My mother called it “unmanageable.” I suppose she thought I was too. And when knots inevitably formed, she shook her head and ordered me to sit for the dreaded comb through, confronting the twists and tangles that were impossible to extricate without tears, no matter what that little girl on tv said.
She wielded the comb like a weapon, spritzing and spraying, trying to rake through the tangles.nThere were tears, so many tears, from both my mother and me, as we struggled and argued. With gritted teeth a look of fierce determination, she’d begin another attack. I sat on the stool, unable to escape, wincing with each pull of the comb. “That knot is like a bird’s nest,” she would say. Feathers don’t tangle, I thought. And birds can fly away from the nest.
My mother always wanted me to have short hair. Like Audrey Hepburn, she said, beautiful, brunette, thin. I wasn’t any of those things. My mother was, with stylishly short hair, back in the early 1960s when she and my dad fell in love and married. I think she felt most beautiful then. We never talked about it. Knots to untangle, my therapist would say, mothers and daughters and expectations, the way our identities intertwine, threads connected, making it hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. I hear her in my words sometimes—the things I say, words and lines I don’t remember learning. I can’t separate the threads that connect us.
When I was six, she taught me to sew. Her own mother, Dorothy, had been an accomplished seamstress. My mother sat beside me, tight lipped and resolute, forming impeccable stitches while I fumbled with the needle. Her sewing served a purpose, uniform and utilitarian, while my own uneven stitches veered into a more creative realm. She tried to teach me to do it like she did, making the back of the piece as neat and orderly as the front, with careful knots and tied off threads. But the flowers and creatures I imagined never followed a pattern and rambled across the canvas, leaving threads dangling and the loose loops of unfinished ideas.
Recently, my own daughter tried to teach me to crochet. She taught herself as a way to relax while studying for med school. It sounded fun, the crocheting, not the med school. Her creations look store bought, clever cats with whiskers and heart shaped pillows, and I jumped at the chance to spend time with her, especially when she presented me with a skein of bright colored yarn all my own. But despite her patient instructions and advice to go back and watch some Youtube videos, “just to help,” I always end up with a ball of tangled yarn, the ends indistinguishable from each other, lost in the numbers and counting of stitches. When she helps me unwind what I began, sorting out the tangles, I can’t help thinking of my mom.
My mother once said that when you have a child, it’s like wearing your heart on the outside. My daughters are grown now, living their own lives, the threads that connect us stretched and frayed, our own knots formed over the years, like the messy side of the embroidery. Despite what that little girl on tv said, there is no magic spray to avoid the tears. Birds fly away from the nest, feathers don’t tangle, but there are knots that can’t be undone.
"No More Tangles" was featured alongside art by my friend Jess Parsons as part of the WiVLA (Women in the Visual and Literary Arts) Collaboration Project at Sabine Studios.
The full exhibition catalog can be found on Amazon.
