Curly Tales

This is about as curly as curly can get.

           I remember it well. It was almost two years ago during the Christmas season. Chris and I were rushing into the grocery store for supper and for once I had change for her to give to the Salvation Army bell ringer.

            Predictably, the African American lady touched Chris’ plethora of curls and couldn’t help commenting on it.

            “I’m bi-racial too,” she told me, “but she looks like she could pass for white.”

            I hope my response sounded less offensive and more dumbfounded like I felt when I sputtered, “But she is white.”

            The woman wasn’t fazed and actually cackled when she replied, “Oh honey! You don’t get hair like that unless you have a little black in you!”

            It wasn’t the first or last time someone questioned my child’s racial background, and not the first or last time I questioned if we were the victims of a hospital baby switch. Unfortunately for her Chris is an exact mix of her dad and me, and there weren’t any other 10-pounders in the hospital when she was born, so I’m fairly confident we brought the right kid home.

            Still, I actually queried my cousins on Facebook as to whether Grandma had some explaining to do.

Hard to tell. But I was rocking a curly mohawk.

            In six years I still haven’t lost my surprise at the inevitable question we always hear, “Is Chris’ dad black?” Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but anybody who knows him would tell you my ex-husband is nearly as far from a person of color as I am. He has a slightly deeper tan than my marshmallow complexion, but that comes from the glow of the computer screen and not from his ethnic heritage.

            Frankly, though, I do have proof that Chris’ incredibly curly hair comes from my side of the family. I tried to dig up some pictures of myself as a child, but most of them show my hair as a halo of fuzz because Mom tried to brush the curls out, or in pig tails because Mom said that was the only way to tame it. My sister actually had curlier hair than me but it wasn’t that noticeable because she had the chubbiest cheeks you’ve ever seen. And I tried to find the picture of my brother with an actual ‘fro in high school but we believe he might have stolen the pic and burned it. He calls it the Cork County Curl and blames it on our Irish background (which is actually a couple of generations down the line) and conveniently forgets our non-Irish father had a bit of ‘fro going on himself.

            So you’ll have to take my word for it that Chris comes by her hair hereditarily. However, she has more of the curl than anyone else in my family – a fact of which she is not always pleased.

            I often find myself recreating my childhood as I try to “style” her hair in the morning, snapping “Stop moving! That doesn’t hurt you!” Alas, I swore I would never say that to my kid like my mean mother did, but I had no way of predicting just how curly her curly hair would be. Indeed, you can’t run a hand through Chris’ hair without having an extraction team on call.

            I never did perfect the “Don’t touch me stranger!” look because I was one of those pregnant ladies that gets fat all over and people didn’t know FOR SURE that I was with child and therefore didn’t rub my belly unsolicited. But Chris has the look down pat. She learned the evil eye at an early age because complete strangers find nothing wrong with approaching a child who moves away from them in fear while they reach out with God-knows-what on their hands and yank on her hair.

First ever haircut. Looks
like a different kid.

            Even I, myself, have a hard time not playing with her hair while watching TV. With those perfect spirals, it’s so darn tempting to pull on them and make the “sprooooinnnng” noise.

            One positive spin to the curl debacle is that it saves us money on haircuts. Because cutting it might just add to the light-socket effect, Chris didn’t have her first haircut until she was almost five years old. That was an hour long process to straighten it just to make sure it was cut evenly at the bottom, although it sprung back to life the second we applied water so I’m not sure why the stylist was concerned with evenness.

            But for one whole day, Chris could see how the other, straighter half lives. She spent the day running her fingers longingly through the silky smoothness and flipping it over her shoulders the way we women do when we’ve had our hair styled professionally. Now, she begs and begs to get her hair straightened but I can usually talk her out of it because that was an awfully long time for her to sit still in a chair.

            I think after all this time that Chris is starting to embrace her uniqueness and knows not everyone gets called Shirley Temple, Little Orphan Annie or Curly Sue.

In a kindergarten exercise the students were asked to write three things they like about themselves and Chris’ #1 was her hair. I don’t know if it was because that’s the one thing she identifies about herself after being constantly reminded of it, or if she thinks she should like it because people tell her so often how grateful she should be.

Either way, she’s stuck with it. I tell her when she’s 18 she can do whatever she wants with her hair and her life and as a typical girl she can’t wait for that day of freedom. I will always hope, though, that the first thing she does is NOT to make a hair-straightening appointment at the salon.

Started out bald. Then straight. Then the curls just wouldn't stop.