Curly girls

Today the littlest member of the household reached an important milestone: her first hair cut!  That’s right: Sula, born with a full head of hair that has been growing strong ever since, had never had her hair cut in all of her three and a half years.  The time had come; the ends were brittle and unhealthy-looking.  And honestly, my own hair wasn’t looking so great either.  So I made appointments for the two of us at a Ouidad salon, where I had my first successful haircut in years last October.  We headed out the door at 7:30 a.m. in order to make it on time to our 9 a.m. appointment, trading a day of preschool for a special girls’ day out.

Now, it’s important to note that there is no way in hell I’d let just anyone with a pair of scissors and a cosmetology certificate touch a strand of Sula’s precious ringlets.  Back in the 80s, a curly-haired woman by the name of Ouidad opened the first salon in the country devoted to curly-haired customers.  Now, Ouidad is a network of salons, a line of products, and a unique method of cutting and styling hair.  You can read more about it here.  You might not know this about me, but I actually have curly hair.  I used to have really curly hair, and had great success following a simple routine of using cheap conditioner and gel and air-drying to bring out the best in my hair.  But after giving birth to Bo it changed dramatically, into a stringy, frizzy mess that I didn’t know what to do with.  I subsequently had a series of disastrous haircuts that left me sobbing in the privacy of my car in various salon parking lots around the state, along with stylists who tried to convince me that it’s no big deal to wash, blow dry, straighten, and use a curling iron (!!) every day to look presentable.  Finally, about six months ago, I got sick and tired of looking like crap and/or straightening my hair every day.  I started researching curly hair salons and came across Ouidad.  I read every review of all the Ouidad-certified salons within a hundred mile radius (there aren’t that many, unfortunately) and settled on a decidedly unpretentious salon whose loyal clients who drive across state lines to get their hair done by the decidedly unpretentious salon owner, Maria, with whom I made an appointment.

The Ouidad salon experience is so unlike any other.  The stylists working there actually have curly hair.  The clients come in with curly hair and leave with curly hair, too.  They cut your hair in a way that works well both straightened or left curly, and teach you how to style it at home to achieve the same results.  Maria is a no-nonsense, middle-aged Portuguese woman who- unlike many, many stylists I’ve encountered- will tell you straight-up that you don’t need to get your hair cut every six to eight weeks.  The cuts are expensive (as are the products, but I find that I have just as much success using cheaper products with the Ouidad styling method) but if you aren’t stripping your hair with sulfates and frying it with a blow dryer every day, you only need two or three per year; Maria fully expects Sula’s to last over a year.  Bottom line: these people know what they are doing.  If you or your child have curly hair, get thee to a Ouidad salon, pronto.  They work with every type of curl from loose waves to tight kinky curls.  I promise that it’s worth the investment.

Okay, enough with the Ouidad promotion.  I just had to put that out there for those seeking help for their or their child’s curly hair.  On to the fun part: pictures!

Too short for the sink even with the booster!

Sula took the whole thing very, very seriously

Sitting patiently under the dryer while Mom got her hair done in the other room

Leaving with a bag of free goodies from Maria

Closeup of the results

School Choices, part 2

In part 1, I discussed the decision to pull Sula from her all-white preschool and send her elsewhere for next year.  Unlike Sula, Dawit’s school is not entirely white.  He’s one of five or six students of color in his class this year.  Last year we were pretty happy, overall, with the services he was receiving at public school.  He had five or six hours a week with an ESL teacher by his side in his classroom, along with one-on-one time with a reading specialist every morning.

But a curious thing happened this year.  Classroom assignments are dictated by the principal of the school, with no input from the teachers who know the students best.  And these assignments are a closely guarded secret, posted on the doors of the school on the Friday afternoon before classes begin the following Monday to ensure that there is no time for parents’ concerns to be aired or rearrangements to take place.  The weekend before school started, I drove up to school to find out who Dawit’s teacher would be.  I was stunned to discover that all of his (academically successful) friends from the previous year were in the smallest class, with the most experienced fourth-grade teacher, who we had hoped Dawit would get.  Dawit was dumped into the largest class- larger than the class with the “smart” kids and the experienced teacher by FOUR students!- with…wait for it…most of the students of color in his grade.  Not a good start to the year, in my opinion.  And my calls to the school and attempts to get an explanation from ANYONE as to why classes would be so radically different in size, especially given that the kids with MORE needs were in the larger class, were unsuccessful.

Dawit’s teacher is nice, but frazzled.  I take Sula to physical therapy at the elementary school every week, and often pass Dawit’s teacher in the hall during her planning time.  She sometimes recognizes me.  It’s taken about…let’s see, it’s now March…six months for her to start making the connection that I’m Dawit’s mother.  There aren’t many other black kids in his fourth-grade class with 27-year-old white mothers with a three-year-old sister who looks like Sula in tow.  Or any, actually.  So it’s kind of weird that she doesn’t remember/recognize me, or ever take a minute to discuss how he’s doing in class.

Her attitude reflects that of the school overall: don’t worry, we’re in charge here, you let us do the educating.  Which would be fine IF Dawit had been speaking English since he started talking, gone to school continuously starting in preschool, and learned to read at age 5.  But he didn’t, and we have some very real academic (and sometimes behavioral) concerns that we feel aren’t always addressed.  I think that the bar is sometimes set too low for him; that he is highly praised for work that isn’t his best, and that everyone is getting a little too complacent now that Dawit’s test scores are catching up to those of his peers.

Another big, no HUGE, issue for us is the fact that this would be Dawit’s last year in elementary school.  Some genius thought it would be a superb idea to herd fifth through eighth grade into the town’s centralized middle school.  So Dawit would go from having one primary teacher overseeing his education to five or six.  I can’t think of a better way to set this child of ours up for failure.  And I had this nagging feeling, too, that if he’s already in the less-academically-rigorous class with most of the kids of color in fourth grade, then he is going to be tracked into lower-level classes with other kids like him, who “require frequent intervention” as we are always reminded on his report cards, for middle school.  The possibility that Dawit would ever truly catch up to (or better yet, surpass) his peers seemed to be getting ever more remote.

We talked about private school.  Our kids will all be able to go to the elite prep school where Adam teaches for grades 6-12, but they need to be prepared, academically, and Dawit simply isn’t ready yet.  Private school’s a funny beast; it costs money, and sometimes provides less services.  The super fancy-shmancy schools were out for the money reason.  Catholic schools are relatively inexpensive, but we’re not Catholic.  We’re not even Christian.  However, several months ago, while at the doctor getting Dawit and Sula their flu shots we ran into an acquaintance whose daughter is also Ethiopian.  She mentioned that her older daughter was attending Catholic school, which I found surprising.  They’re Unitarians who sent that same daughter to a Jewish preschool, so I was intrigued by their choice.  She laughed, and said, “Oh, no, it’s not what you’d think.  It’s really diverse, very open, people of all kinds send their kids there.”  The wheels started turning; we went home and researched it.

We took Dawit for a visit there, with Sula in tow, and fell in love.  The school is kindergarten through eight grade, housed in a beautiful old building in the middle of the city.  A warm, homey feeling emanated from the school.  Every adult knew every child’s name.  The school is incredibly racially diverse; better yet, a significant portion of the population is made up of African immigrants.  Dawit was immediately comfortable, which we expected because he is friendly and profoundly UN-shy.  But it was more than that:  we could tell that this was a community in which he genuinely wanted to participate.  He spent the whole day shadowing a current student and left feeling that he had made friends.

The principal seemed well-educated about the needs of children like ours, and unafraid to take on the challenges that those needs entail.  The school has a special reading curriculum (Wilson) that Dawit so desperately needs.  And they have students who have faced similar hardships to ours: children who have had inconsistent schooling, who have immigrated away from everything they’ve known, or who have been separated from loved ones for any number of reasons.  A nice bonus?  We went there seeking a school for Dawit and ended up finding a school for Sula as well.  I was sold the minute we walked into the preschool room and not only saw curious little brown faces and box braids staring up at us, but a no-nonsense teacher with a West African accent.  Sula would blend in easily.

We applied for Dawit and Sula and kept our fingers crossed.  The school wasn’t sure if they would have space for Dawit in the fall; we needed to wait until they had completed enrollment for their current students.  We were excited but terrified that we had no plan B for Dawit.  It was either Catholic school or public middle school for next year.  The day we came home from picking up Bo at preschool and saw the fat manila envelope that I just knew couldn’t be a rejection notice bulging out of the mailbox, I felt like we won the lottery.

To be honest, this change might end up being a logistical nightmare.  Instead of having three kids in schools in our town either a ten minute drive or a yellow school bus stop away, we’ll have one kid at public school in town, and two kids at a school twenty minutes away.  We haven’t quite figured that part out yet.  I may need to spend my mornings commuting into the city to get Sula and Dawit to school, returning once mid-day to get Sula and then again to get Dawit in the afternoons in the fall when Adam has soccer practice.  We did discover a wonderfully diverse Boys and Girls Club nearby that we signed up Dawit for.  For $25 a year (yes, you read that right!), he can walk there after school and swim in the indoor pool, shoot hoops in the gym, play foosball in the game room, do his homework with assistance in the computer lab, or train with a fabled boxing coach in the boxing ring upstairs.  (No, adults are not allowed to join.  I asked.)  Dawit is going to have to work hard in his new environment, but he’s going to get to play hard, too.

I feel at peace with our decisions for Sula’s and Dawit’s education next year.  There is a racial element underlying these moves that I accept others won’t necessarily understand.  Recently, in an online adoption community I belong to, someone shared a story of their African American son being harassed and humiliated and falsely accused of stealing in a department store.  Most of us were horrified, our hearts hurting as the images of our own black sons in the same situation swirling in our minds.  Even then, though, one or two parents threw out questions: Was the boy acting suspiciously?  How do you know that this is racism, and not just plain old rudeness?  I’m sure that others feel the same way about Sula and her preschool: how do we really know that the other children don’t want to play with her or hold her hand or be her friend because of her skin color?  Or Dawit: how do we know that he’s in a larger class because he’s black?  He has friends in public school, why move him if he’s happy where he is?

Obviously, I can’t know the answers to all of these questions.  But there is research and a wealth of experiences of fellow parents to children of color that back up our choices.  Read Kristen’s post about “Bigotry, blindness, and basketball.”  Or the article in Newsweek that explored how racial discrimination occurs even among babies.  Or any of the myriad of studies that reveal grim outcomes for black students in public school settings.  I can’t say for sure that the things my children have experienced are simply because they are black.  But as parents, we want our children to be in an environment where they are embraced and encouraged, and give them the best opportunities to succeed academically and socially because we KNOW they can.

Now, we’re walking the walk.

School choices, part 1

Over the past several years, as Adam and I have developed a better understanding of race and privilege, it became overwhelmingly clear that we were simply not doing enough to ensure that our children were surrounded by people who look like them.  We had taken small steps: having Kiddy involved in our lives; joining a geographically inconvenient but racially diverse YMCA; sending Dawit to the Boys and Girls Club with nary a white person in sight; attending events for Ethiopian adoptive families, and so on.  But we had failed in one critical area: school.  The places where our children spend a significant amount of time, where they go to learn and socialize and develop a sense of their place in the world, are simply not diverse enough.  We realized that we needed to walk the walk and make some really big changes in order to meet our kids’ needs as people of color in a dominant white society.

I’m incredibly ashamed to admit this, but Sula is the only child of color at her school this year.  Yup, you read that right.  Out of the entire school population, there is only one child of color.  I had plenty of logical reasons for sending her there.  We chose the school for Bo before we had brought Sula and Dawit home from Ethiopia.  With a socially-anxious two-year-old Bo in tow, I had toured most of the preschools in our area, seeking a place that offered the warm, nurturing environment that Bo needed to bring him out of his shell.  Racial diversity wasn’t even on my radar.  I knew when I walked into the building and the director crouched down on her knees to greet Bo with a broad smile that it was the right place for him.  In order to secure a spot for the three-year-old class that fall, Adam arrived at 6:15 in the morning on registration day with a lawn chair and papers to grade while he and the dozens of other parents waited for the door to open at 10.

Everything was great, at first.  Bo attended his first day of preschool while Adam and I were halfway around the world meeting his new brother and sister for the first time.  In the midst of some serious family chaos, preschool was a tranquil oasis where Bo could escape from his needy baby sister who always wanted to be on Mom’s lap and his bigger, faster, stronger older brother and form his own identity and make his own friends.  Bo was a nightmare at home, a furious ball of rage and tears, but when he was a preschool he was a solemnly pleasant turn-taker and hand-raiser.  He loved his teachers and always looked forward to school.  There was only one little blip on that radar of mine, when I realized that the entire curriculum for December seemed to be centered upon Christmas, and, well, we’re Jews.  The school director told me I was welcome to come in and do a Chanuka presentation, but I was still operating in crisis mode as I learned to balance my new life with my new job and my new kids.  No matter; Bo was sick one week that month anyways, and I just kept him home the rest of the month because it was easier and heck, it was December and I didn’t feel like going out in the cold with two toddlers anyways.

Every day I’d wait in line to pick up Bo with Sula cuddled in the sling, from which she would shyly greet Bo’s adoring teachers.  Over the course of the year, Sula began to like and trust the sweet, child-centered teachers of the three-year-old class at school.  After a tumultuous first two years of life, with the scenes and cast of characters around her constantly changing, I thought that it made a great deal of sense to send Sula to the school that could offer familiar faces and routines.  Never mind that all of those faces were white, I figured; they were loving, familiar faces, and that was what mattered most.  And so Sula went to the same preschool that Bo attends, with the same teachers he had last year.

But I started to pick up some signals on my radar this year.  First, at the beginning of December, when the director called me in to discuss the holiday program and the curriculum for the month.  My concerns about the exclusivity of the curriculum and the other-ing of my children fell on ears that I suspected were capable of hearing, but were being covered by a woman singing “lalalalalala.”  I was reminded that changes were being made ONLY because of Bo and Sula, that this school has had a tradition of doing things the way they do for the past thirty or so years, and that parents expect things to remain that way.  Our family was in the minority, and I was expected to understand that.

Then, a few weeks ago, Sula confided in Adam that a little girl in her class named Sarah Brown told her she didn’t like her.  Sarah didn’t want to play with Sula, and had used unkind words to wound her and push her away.  Our hearts broke for our gentle and sensitive little girl.  Her teachers were distressed and offered an explanation: “I bet Sarah is jealous.  Sula is so beautiful; she will probably have to deal with this for the rest of her life.”  I am afraid that they were right about one thing: Sula WILL have to deal with this for the rest of her life.  But I’m not sure that it’s just because she is beautiful.  She IS beautiful, spectacularly so, but in a way that is so unique and beyond the reach of plain little girls like Sarah Brown that I fear Sula’s uniqueness and her brownness and her differences will evoke hatred and anger in others.  But at age three?  We should be doing a better job of protecting her.  We shouldn’t put her in a situation where her peers take note as all of the teachers and parents blather on about how GORGEOUS she is and how AMAZING her curls or braids are and how “Sula” is just such a DIFFERENT name.  If I were Sarah Brown, with straight mousy-brown hair and eyes that don’t sparkle, I might hate Sula, too.  Sula needs to be around more Sulas and less Sarah Browns.

So today, when the preschool director approached me to ask where we were sending Sula for next year, I took a breath and let out the lines that I had rehearsed over and over.  I explained that we were seeking a more racially diverse environment and had chosen a new school for that reason, but that I would be happy to offer suggestions for diversifying the school, if she would find that helpful for the future.  She was not interested, but I expected as much.  She blamed the lack of diversity on the surrounding area, which to be fair, is mostly white; however, I vividly recall the very same woman bragging about the fact that this particular preschool has students from more than a dozen towns, where I’m certain there are plenty of brown people.  But, you see, she explained, she just answers the phone when interested (white) parents call to inquire about preschool for their precious little children.  Her job is to write down their names.  Nothing more, nothing less.  And that’s just not good enough for us anymore.