Hi!

I'm almost 21 years old and my mother is forcing me to perm my hair. In her defense, she pays (a lot) for my education and if I weren't living on campus I'd still be under her roof.
My mom has never made me feel ashamed of my hair, but I'm looking for my first serious job and she believes that the clients I will be working with won't accept my (admittedly wild) natural hair. I have no arguments there, and I have agreed to straighten my hair (although I'm deathly afraid of losing my curls to heat damage) but I really really really don't want to start perming my hair again. I relaxed and straightened my hair for the good majority of my high school years, and when I decided to stop I dealt with stringy don't-wanna-curl-for-nothing hair for years. I finally have hair that I love and accept and it'd kill me to have to go through the battle of getting it to curl on it's own all over again.

My mom thinks that everything will be fine because she has a perm and wears her hair curly and it looks beautiful, but I can't seem to convince her that we do not have the same hair. Her argument is that it would be too difficult to straighten my natural hair, but even when I was getting my hair relaxed it would take me hours to straighten it all because I have so much.

When my hair is wet and I detangle with my Denman, my ends spring up into the tight little corkscrews I've grown to love, but the middle is frizzy and not as defined. When my hair dries, it all looks uniform but the top section of my head remains frizzy. Certain sections in the back of my head are the opposite: when wet, the roots are more defined and my ends still look kinda stringy until they dry into curls. My mother claims that this is because the bottom portion of my hair is still permed, and that we could get a 'baby relaxer' and only relax the top portion of my head to get a uniform texture. I'm not convinced.

How in the world am I going to convince my hell-bent mother not to perm my hair?