Page 83 - North Star Magazine 2022

I call my grandmother back, hands shaking with fury. She answers in a clipped, angry tone.
“If you think my self-worth and womanhood is gone with my hair, you’re an idiot. Long hair does not a woman make.”
She hangs up on me without a word, and I know that she will not answer my calls for the next several days. Somehow, I don’t mind at all. I feel a vicious kind of satisfaction at having taken something back for myself and briefly wonder if this is what real freedom feels like.