Hair Dilemmas

I’m a sucker for a great one hour show of 48 Hours Mystery. I can watch marathons of Snapped, Investigators and Nancy Grace, to name a few. Some shows I can’t handle watching. Dr. Phil (I know, shocker), I also can’t stomach a mere episode of any shows pertaining to abuse, such as hitting, beating, gang bullying, drug and alcohol additions. Why I can watch the first set of shows, and not the others, I have no idea. Perhaps, the latter hits too close to home. I get anxiety, and immedietely have to turn the channel. Animal abuse is another one. Have you ever seen that commercial that shows all the mistreated animals in shelters? Sarah McLachlan sings that sad, pitiful song asking you to donate money to help out the animal shelters. I hate that commercial! I turn the channel every time It comes on.

Each time I go to Petsmart, and the little debit machine asks you if you’d to donate money to help out shelters, I always do. When I tell you of this quirk I have about the shows I will watch, and the shows I won’t watch , it probably sounds a bit contradicting I’m sure.

Yesterday, was my daughters birthday. My relationship with my children, seems to be great. Of course, not all days are peachy keen, but for the most part my kids are good. When I was growing up, I was the kind of girl that always loovvveddd to wear dresses, big bows in my hair, (if your Southern, you get that comment) anything girly I was up for. The more southern you are, the bigger the bows. I was quite a girly girl even though I’m like Z.K. where as I was the only girl with three brothers. If I didn’t tell you that, you would probably have thought that I might have been a tom boy. Nope.

 I’d say Z.K. has always dressed very cute. Smocked dresses to church (which I loved to make), cute pants and shrugs that I’d love to sew as well. She’s recently started to come into her own, and try to figure out who she is. She doesn’t want me to dress her like I used to. Understandably so. I know kids grow up, and want to dress how they’d. I’m all for individual expression.

I’ve never given her trouble about what she wears, except I do have some things that she’s required to wear. One of those things are some sort of flower, clip, or a cute bobby pin in her hair. I do that for several reasons. She’s at school all day, and I don’t want her to have to be distracted by her hair in her face. The other reason is that I hate stringy  hair. The little girls now days do nothing to their hair, and it makes them look unkept, in my opinion.

As I said earlier, she woke up on her birthday and decided she wanted to wear her little tiara to school. Very cute. I diffused her hair for about twenty-five minutes ( she has curly hair, so it takes forever to blow dry), and then I pinned it up, She looked darling. Yesterday, of all days, she was determined to wear her hair completely different than she normally does. She pitched the biggest fit. Since being a toddler, she hasn’t acted that way.

She ended up crying for so long, wouldn’t get dressed, tried to take her hair down, and ended up missing the bus. It was her birthday, and I felt it wasn’t going well. After about fifteen minutes, I finally took her to school. I had M. talk with her, which he always seems to calm her down, and is able to speak rational with her. I, on the other hand, not so much.

When she got to school, I apologized to her, she apologized to me, we hugged and it was over. She was happy, and so was I.

The thing that resonated with me was that I started thinking about all those shows I watch. It seems that many times I hear of parents getting on television and say how much they regret not saying a particular thing to their child. Or that the last thing they said was something mean.

I realized at that moment, heaven for bid; what if that would have been the last time I would have seen Z.K.? What if by chance something had happened to her? I would be so sad, and distraught that had happened. How unimportant was it that she wanted to wear her hair a certain way. It would have nonsensical, and ridiculous . Is that really so important in the scheme of things?

I learned a great lesson. It’s very hard to relinquish my pride and apologize first, but I’m going to do it.

 Who was the child in that situation? I’ll raise my hand to that one and say, I’m guilty.

Mind you, she still wears those silly flowers everyday. What’s wrong with a 12 year old girl wearing adornments in her hair? Nothing at all. I still wear clips, pins, bandanas, headbands, hats, and I’m 40 years old.