There are a lot of things I like to blame on my mom. I blame her for my knowledge of the phrase, "If God had wanted holes in your ears, he would have put them there." I blame her for my extreme aversion to frozen dinners (seriously, if I so much as see another TV Dinner in my lifetime, I will stop eating all together for ever and ever) (including funnel cake) (THAT is how serious I am). And I most definitely blame her for the fact that I have always hated my pin-straight hair.
While she had perfect natural waves running through her thick, black hair, I've always had not-quite-blond but not-really-brown-either baby-fine and very straight hair. Which she made me perm regularly, starting when I was in kindergarten.
Yes, indeed, I remember being 5-years old and sitting at my Aunt Susan's house as she wrapped little tiny curlers all through my mousey brown hair and then doused it in stinky chemicals. I remember her doing it again about a month later, too. You see, my hair and curl? They just don't co-exist. I can perm perm perm my hair and it'll go right on back to straight within a few months. That didn't stop my mom from forcing the curly hair issue for my whole life, but whatever. By the time I hit high school, only losers had straight hair anyway. If your bangs weren't so poofy that you could hide a birds nest inside, then you just couldn't show up for life.
And then I went to college and realized that straight hair? Is a good thing. Now I like it. Really.
But that doesn't mean I don't LOOOOOVE Alexis' curls. Because, OMG! I LOVE HER CURLS. Soooo much. I didn't expect her to keep them as she grew from a tiny baby to a crazy toddler and then on to a lively preschooler, but, they're still there. She has the most perfect, bouncy curls that ever found their way onto a kid's head. When it's humid outside? I could sit and sproing her curls for hours, which pretty much makes up for the fact that my hair ends up glued to my head, kind of like a wet dog's fur.
Alexis, on the other hand, HATES her curls. Every morning she fusses at me to make her hair straight. If she catches me scrunching her hair into curls, she rips my head off. Just last week she looked in the bathroom mirror and asked for straight hair. I told her that her curls were beautiful and she responded by bawling and crying that she wanted straight hair just like mine.
:-/
So, I concocted a plan. I looked at photos of some of her favorite celebrities and figured out who had curly hair. I planned to point out that those people looked gorgeous, curly hair and all. It was a genius plan.
Except that I blew it.
We went to see a stage production of Annie not long ago. This Annie started the show with straight hair, but when she got all dolled up for Christmas, she slapped on the curly wig. As she walked across the stage, I whispered to Alexis, "Look! She looks so pretty with curly hair!"
"She looks like a clown," Alexis replied. "It's really ugly."
She was right. Unfortunately.
When Alexis grows up and spends a fortune getting those curls straightened, let the record show that it WAS NOT MY FAULT.
She can blame my mom instead.
