Coming to terms with the curls

I have never liked my hair.

My hairdo in 1st grade was Dad's doing. I'm the only one with such curly hair in my family, so none of us knew what to do with it. Dad had this big brush with soft bristles he'd drag through my kinky curls until I had a giant pouf on my head. Then mom would come along and snap it down with two little barrettes.

Basically, I spent my childhood looking like a muppet.

When I got to junior high, I went through all kinds of agony trying to fit in with the other girls who had luscious straight hair they'd smooth down so demurely in class. I was sure they were doing it to torment me and I tried so hard to replicate that look - waking up two hours before school to put big hot rollers in, which was pointless and gave me the same muppet-look as my dad's big brush.

We have holiday photos at the dinner table where I'm trying to hide behind the turkey - my hair sticking out in a giant-gelled triangle.

I like to think I've matured a lot since then, but I still haven't come to terms with my curls. I've developed this way of kind of pretending my hair's not there when I look in the mirror or walk down the street. I’m always sort of horrified to see photos of myself.

"That’s what I look like from the side? Why didn’t somebody tell me?"

Then a few weeks ago I hear about this video that's gone viral on YouTube. It's a Sesame Street muppet singing about her hair.



I don't even cry in sappy movies, but this little singing puppet got me all misty and a bunch of other people, too. More than a million people have watched it and check out the messages on the video page . . . I followed some of the links in those comments and found out there are actually online support groups for curly people. I had no idea.

It's more than a little ironic, I know, that I'm getting this message from a muppet when for all these years I thought my problem was that my hair made me LOOK like a muppet.

But I've resolved to turn over a new leaf. I recently found a hairdresser who specializes in curly hair and I commiserated with some other girls at work who are African American and have super-kinky curls. At their urging I bought some new products off the black hair aisle at the drug store, which I always avoided before thinking my hair was much different than African American hair. It's not, I've discovered.

You probably won't notice a difference when you next see me: my curls are just as tight and unruly as always. But I think maybe there's a difference happening on the inside.