Raising A Daughter- I don't know who made my job harder...white people or lil Wayne!

It couldn't have been just me...do you remember being little and playing with a slip or towel on your head so you could swing it around and imagine you had long hair. Most little black girls have participated in this imaginary play at one time or another...I watched my own daughter do it bound to fight the same battle.

By the time I had a daughter I had accepted my hair and embraced my naps and tried to be a good hair role model...there weren't nearly as many resources for natural hair sisters but I did my best and I was going to fight the good fight for her. She did not grow up in the hair shop like me...I remember the time we hung out in a friends salon and my daughter did not know how to turn on the sit-down hair dryer...there was a gasp and most in the place were appalled...I smiled proudly.

I only bought my daughter brown dolls and made sure she had lots of healthy, black images of beauty in her life, we had the talks about skin color before she could cognitively understand what it all meant...my daughter is dark chocolate and though I always thought she was beautiful I knew that she would soon pick up the cues from her environment, peers and the media that something was inherently wrong with her dark skin and hair that would not lay down without a fight.

There was no such thing as good hair or bad hair in our house and I could tell that she had an appreciation for black beauty by the images she stuck to the walls in her room in her preteen years...from the opaque sista to the coal black queen, from Tyra and Monique...all shapes and sizes! I was proud and thought I had done my job well but soon realized she did not escape buying the beauty myth... I was wrong.

Though she could see all the diversity of beauty in others she could not see it in herself and grew up feeling bad about her skin color and hair...what she did have at a young age was a well-developed body so she overcompensated with it just like I did with my ample bosom back in my adolescence- you have no idea how hard it was to grow up in Cali without an "L.A. face and an Oakland booty" that is a whole nother post!

Suddenly, my pretty black girl wants to look like somebody else, fit in, be a video vixen like every other girl around her, an object of desire...as much as it pains me I understand. I remember feeling unbeautiful and inadequate too. At 16 I allowed her make a her first major hair decision...she wanted a perm AND a weave...I let her do it...she had to come to terms with who she was and her own beauty in her own time just like me...her journey is her own. After nearly two years of perm, hair damage and breakage...she has an epiphany after missing a few perms and inspired to do a baking soda treatment after she saw the results of mine, "Mom, i think I want to go natural...i didn't know my natural hair was so soft." I just smiled to myself, European beauty standards and rappers be dammed...she is her mother's daughter.