Love Hurts, High School Style

Most of last week, I was in Las Vegas on a project, but every time I spoke to Sisi by phone, I got an earful about "The Boy I Like"-- hereinafter referred to "B" for "boy"--to protect his privacy. Of course, there's no way in hell any of Sisi's friends would EVER do something as lame as read her mother's blog, but it is the Internet and I guess you never know. I wouldn't want to ruin my daughter's social life by revealing too much...

(Can you tell by the emphasis in the last two sentences who I've been talking to about this? Oh, the limits of the black and white thinking of as teenager! Pun intended!)

Just before I left town last week, Sisi was trying to decide if she was going to Homecoming. Tickets were on sale, and most of her friends weren't going. They are, after all, lowly freshmen and not as fully invested in the school as the upperclassmen.

On Friday afternoon, when I had a break from my work, I called home and was greeted with an enthusiastic: "I've been waiting all day to tell someone this news!" I wish Sisi got excited about getting an "A" on a project, but I knew better. This had to be about "the boy she likes."

"B asked me to Homecoming!" she gushed. "So I'll need a dress, and shoes, and a hairdo and..."

"Slow your roll," I said. "You're not Homecoming Queen. Take it easy here."

Let the negotiations begin!

We decided she'd get a new dress, borrow a pair of my fancy heels, style her hair herself and buy some inexpensive jewelry or a sparkly barrette or other hair ornament. Budget $100.

Because I was away, Kevin got the dress-selecting job. It's one of those things that if you'd told him six or seven years ago that he'd be doing on a Sunday afternoon, he'd have laughed, but there he was patiently sifting through cocktail dresses in the Juniors department of Macy's, doing his best to keep his step-daughter classy and not trashy-- with some brief guidelines from me. No strapless, not more than two inches above the knee, please. They found an adorable dress on-budget and sent me a picture.

Good. Sisi was bubbling with excitement. Her first Homecoming--- and her first real date!

I got home on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, our house was full of the usual cadre of girls. "This is my dress," I heard her telling them as passed by her room. "With these shoes... and I'm thinking of twisting my hair like this..."

But by Thursday the picture had changed.

"He dumped me," she said when I met her after school. Her eyes filled with tears. "He said he didn't think it would work out and he'd rather be 'just friends'. He's taking someone else."

Of course, she was hurt. But we had a good talk. About how there are plenty of fish in the sea. About how "B" may have done her favor by breaking it off. About why it would be stupid to try to chase after him-- and smarter to act like you just don't care.

"You've got a beautiful dress. You could go anyway with a group of friends," I suggested.

"But none of my friends were going," she told me. "I don't want to go if I don't have anyone to hang out with."

I started looking for the receipt for the dress.

So, here we are. Homecoming was tonight...but Sisi didn't go. We returned the dress this afternoon, and instead, she and her friends held an "anti-Homecoming" party, playing board games and eating pizza. They had a blast. If she's thought about "B" at all, I can't tell. She's seems perfectly content with her friends, her games, her music and her pizza.

Heartache healed...for now. This one was easy: she liked this boy, but it wasn't "love," thank goodness.

First love, however, is coming. My next door neighbor's son just graduated from the same high school... and is marrying his girlfriend next month before joining the Air Force. "They've been dating since freshman year," she told me. "She's his first real girlfriend. He's always made good decisions and never given us a minute's worry..." she sighed. "But they're both so young. This wasn't in my plan for him. None of it."

Or Sisi's friend who breaks up with her 15-year-old boyfriend once a week... and threatens to kill herself every time. She doesn't; it's mostly drama. But it's still scary to hear and has caused Sisi and the girl's family considerable distress.

Not in the plan, either.

Love is coming...and heartbreak is coming, too, the kind pizza and Wii don't cure. I hate the thought of it, but there's nothing I can do. It comes to us all, it some point. It's one of the experiences that leads us into maturity.

I can only hope Sisi shows the same resilience and flexibility she has over this incident when love and heartbreak come. I can hope... but love, like so many things, has it own plans.

The Big M...

A couple of nights ago, I got a call from my doctor. I was expecting it... but still, when it came I felt a little sad.

"Well, Karyn," she said. "I got your blood work back and the levels confirm it. You're definitely at the beginning of the end."

Not the beginning of the end of my life (I hope) but the beginning of the end of my childbearing years. Yes, it's the beginning of what my mother's generation called "the change." Menopause, or more accurately perimenopause, the stretch of time between the symptoms of menopause and it's actual arrival.

You have to love my doctor's phrasing. "The beginning of the end" sounds so dire, but in a way, those are exactly my feelings about this stage of my life. Don't get me wrong, I don't want any more children. But it's more than that: in the back of my mind I'm realizing this is the beginning of the end of my youth. It's the beginning of my life as an "old lady."

And while it's something that happens to every woman if she's lucky enough to keep breathing long enough, it's somehow something I didn't really think would ever happen to me.

There has no mistaking the changes in my moods and in my body over the past year or so. Suddenly, I had a mustache and I was always warm even in the dead of winter. My once-curvy body had gotten round as an apple, with a nasty little pouch up front that never went away no matter what I did. My patience was hair-trigger sensitive. And then, for the first time in my life, I skipped a period... and I wasn't pregnant.

The beginning of the end.

I wish I could say I am immediately embracing this change for the new possibilities it offers. In time, of course, I will. But for right now, it makes me feel sad. I look back on my youth and I regret things I didn't do, things I was too scared to try. I regret that I didn't know how cute I was-- and that I didn't believe that the day would come when "matronly" would be an accurate description of my figure. That "hot" would be an adjective for "flash" and not for me.

I look at Sisi and I feel a little jealous. Does she know what she has right now? Does she know that one day, she will be me? Probably not. It seems unbelievable when you're young, that you will one day be... not.
Sometimes I think the heart of the mother-daughter conflict is simply that while the daughter's hormones are soaring, the mother's are declining. It's just biology and little more. We're a couple of moody bitches who don't really know what the hell is wrong with us. Enter fighting.

Poor Kevin. :-)

One of my favorite sayings is "This too shall pass" because it captures the transience of our experiences so perfectly. I know that twenty or thirty years from now, I'll look back and wish for some the blessings I have now: flexibility, mobility, my kids at home, otherwise perfect health. I'll wish for these days--hot flashes in all. Knowing that helps me to find acceptance for this moment. There's good in this, I know there is. Of course there is. It's just going to take me a minute or two to find it.

It's the beginning of the end, but it's also the end of the beginning. And experience and wisdom are wonderful things to say that I have gained a bit of at this point in my life. It's celebration and grief. It's joy and pain, it's endings and beginnings. A perfect circle of womanhood and a perfect circle of life.

I'm glad the woman at the center of the Dr. Laura controversy, Nita Henson, has come forward. Her story further expounds on the difficulty that interracial families have in searching for resources and advice on the complexities of "blending" in a black and white society.

If you haven't heard her talk about the incident, here's her interview on The Larry King Show:

We'll leave Dr. Laura's assessment of herself as a victim whose First Amendment rights were violated in this experience for others to debate. This isn't a political blog: it's a family one. Interracial families may espouse many different political points of views-- and many different ideas about what is racist and what isn't.

And that's exactly the point that Halima Sal Anderson (who authors the popular blog, www.dateawhiteguy.blogspot.com-- as well as other publications about interracial and intercultural dating) and I were debating in the comments of my prior Dr. Laura blog. Halima points out that interracial couples have so many different ideologies, and deal with the perceptions of racial and gender inequality in so many different ways-- that it can be very difficult to construct a "clearinghouse" of how to handle race/gender issues like the one faced by Hanson and her hubby. Here's Halima's take:

I also have noted that when you bring interracial families together physically, some other dynamics can come into play, and you may find that one family or both have ideas and beliefs that are threatening and or are demeaning to those of the opposite combination.

One instance springs to mind and if you bring a bm-ww relationship together with a bw-wm in any sort of group interaction or purpose, you may fast discover (and I am going to give this example because I have come across it often) that because the bm-ww relationship was in some way precipitated because of racio-misogynic notions of the inferiority of bw and even the trashing of the white male identity, the interactions can be damaging to the black woman even the white man!

This is the problem I have observed when we 'bring' all interracial and intercultural groups together, you end up finding that many of the members are not as 'open minded' as an interracial relationship would suggest or has been made to indicate. How indeed can a black woman thrive under such conditions where she is reminded in a variety of ways that the reason for the founding of the other opposite relationship is because she is deemed inferior/less than.

In my view general mixed race relationship spaces [clearinghouses or communities like I suggested in my post] are not safe spaces for black women. As a bw i have come to notice this.


She's right, of course. I come from a very progressive point of view on relationships and tend to hang out with couples share that ideology. But I too have met couples whose relationships work on very different dynamics. I've met the BW-WM couple who seem to minimize blackness or femaleness. I've also met couples where the white male is the partner whose personhood is minimized. Halima's point speaks to a powerful reminder: just as there is no single definition of what it means to be a "black Person" or a "white person" there's no single way to be an interracial couple. Indeed, we can be as different as we are individually.

So, for Nita Henson, advice about how to address the frequency with which her husband's white friends brought up racial issues in her presence would differ depending on who in the community of interracial relationships was asked. Some might suggest getting angry, some might suggest, as Dr. Laura did, that Nita was being hypersensitive--and there might be hundreds of other suggestions in between.

Concerns about the "ideology behind the answer" is probably the reason that interracial couples maintain a certain level of silence about any problems in the relationship that have racial overtones. That's probably why the party line is "race doesn't matter". And from my own experiences I know it doesn't... until it does.

The truth is actually that most of us face issues-- and race plays its roles in how they appear. But revealling that fact puts interracial couples in an awkward position because fuels the arguments of those who believe that interracial relationships are a bad idea or that they can't work. Discuss such personal conflicts with the wrong advisor and you could get advice so bad that one begins to question one's own decisions and reactions. That's what Nita Henson seems to have felt after hanging up with Dr. Laura last week. Such harsh criticism makes keeping silent seem like a very good idea.

Still, if those outside the relationship can't be trusted to give good advice, at the very least, problems like the one that Nita Henson faced with her husband's friends should be discussed carefully and lovingly between the couple. If there is any universal advice to be offered it's simply this: "Have you told your husband how you feel about this? Has he offered to speak to his friends--or to help you respond to these comments and questions when they come up?" Because truly, progressive or conservative, interracial couples--like any married partners-- have to be able to communicate with each other-- and to count on each other for support.

Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue... When Does Experimenting With One's Look Become Self-Hate?

Having a teenaged daughter who has two black parents, a white step-father and bi-racial half sister is perfect fodder for anyone who wants to write a family blog on race, identity and family. Almost daily she says something that raises issues I think are appropriate for this blog, but not always does she give me her consent to talk about them. Yesterday, she told me something supremely interesting, but when I asked if I could blog about it, she said "No." I even offered to change it up some. She still said no. I think she's being slightly unreasonable-- after all, none of her friends would EVER do anything as boring as read her MOTHER's blog-- but I respect her and her privacy. You'll all just have to wait to find out what she revealed in one of our (ongoing) mother-daughter talks yesterday. She did, however, give me permission to recount today's story.

It begins in Walmart (like any good story) with a discussion over makeup. I had promised her she could start wearing it in high school and now Sisi wants a ton of it. Since she starts that institution of higher learning this Fall, she's lobbying hard to build her supply: eyeshadows, mascara, thick black eyeliner.

"No," I said. "First, it's still summer. You're not in high school yet. Second, until you're buying it yourself, I'm in control of how much makeup you can wear. And I think mascara and a little lip gloss is enough. Maybe a neutral shadow. We'll see."

She argued with me: I'll spare you a repeat of all that. But what she said when she finally gave up on eyeshadow and liquid eyeliner is where I once again confronted questions of race, identity and the double-standards of it all. Because after a long pause, she asked, "If I saved my money and bought them myself, could I have blue contact lenses?"

My daughter has perfect eyesight-- she only wears glasses in costumes or in the sun--so the purpose of these contact lenses would be cosmetic only.



Sisi in her doctor costume last Halloween. Very fake glasses.

But her suggestion triggered so much more in me. In the space of a blink, I thought of Toni Morrison's masterpiece, The Bluest Eye-- the story of a black girl who longs for white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes.
I thought of the story I read of the Caribbean woman who paid close to $8,000 for a surgical procedure to turn her dark brown eyes blue-- a procedure that failed-- and nearly went blind in the process. (Read about it here.) I think of James Brown singing "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud." I think of chemical relaxers and hair weaves, of colorism, of just how hard it can be to affirm that "black is beautiful" in a culture that makes daily assaults on brown eyes, kinky hair and curvy figures.

My daughter, like most teens is a voracious consumer of this culture... and now she wants blue eyes.

"Absolutely not," I said before I had really thought about it. "You have beautiful brown eyes, why would you want to cover them up?"

"But you let me dye my hair," she reminded me.

True. I did. Not only did I let her dye her hair, I let her dye it purple, in the hope that being allowed to do it would get the desire for "crazy hair" out of her system once and for all. It worked.

"So what's the difference?" she demanded.

The difference of course, is everything that blue eyes suggests to African Americans about our "insufficiencies." And I was about to say something along that lines, but instead I thought of my other daughter, my Lil Bit, with her green eyes and fair skin. In my mind, I fast-forwarded a decade, and imagined her asking me the same question: "Mom, can I have blue contacts?"

My initial reaction was the same-- "Why would you want contacts if you don't need them to see?" but after that, I had no issue. There were no concerns of pride in racial identity, no worries about self hate, no need to defend the choice beyond reasons of finances or frivolity.

As soon as I realized that I was applying a double standard to my daughter's choices about how to experiment with the beauty God gave them, I knew I was probably being unfair to Sisi and loading her up with the same limited (and limiting) notions of black beauty that hamstring the choices of so many. I realized that because I'm sensitive what others have defined as "black beauty" (e.g.natural hair, brown or black eyes, a big butt, or whatever) my automatic refusal to even consider her request was, in fact, applying the same kind of double standard that black women are subjected to daily. If we choose to straighten our hair-- we're trying to be white. When white women straighten their hair, it's a choice. When we wear weaves or wigs, we're trying to be white. But when white women wear "extensions" they are enhancing their natural hair. When we change the color of our eyes, we're trying to be something we're not. When white women do it, they are experimenting with a fresh look. It's a double standard and it's silly and unfair. While the black community as a whole may continue to define "blackness" and black women according to narrow and specifically "authentic" images, it's not something that I want to perpetuate in my own family.

It is absolutely essential to me that BOTH my girls grow up to believe in their limitless potential. That potential is not simply in academic, career or professional opportunities: it also extends to much more mundane choices like how they wear their hair. And while I still think it's silly to wear contacts if you don't need them to see, if Sisi actually saves her money and insists on buying them, I'll do my best to see it like the purple hair-- as a mild and youthful exploration into counterculture. Blue contacts would also bring her some questions-- and perhaps even some disdain--from some who might feel that her choice abandons something fundamental about black identity. I know we'd have to have a lot of conversations about all of that. Still, I believe my daughters can have a strong black identity-- even with purple hair and blue eyes.

What I really don't want to see is any tattoos... but, for now at least, that's a worry for another day.

Hair-Raising Adventures-- Relaxers, Naturals and Transitioning

Yesterday, I took Sisi to the salon for a touch-up. We hadn't been in a while-- she gets a touch up maybe twice a year-- and she had quite a bit of new growth. I would have preferred to wait until the Fall since she'll spend the summer swimming and spelunking and generally do all kinds of things that make spending money on hair now silly. But this is impossible: the 8th grade prom is this weekend and there is no way my big girl is going to the prom "looking busted" as she put it.

My feelings about my own hair have changed. After nearly three decades of regular chemical relaxers, I'm seriously considering going natural.

Why? Several reasons, that, it turns out, are interconnected.

1. I workout every day. Most weeks, I run three times a week (3-4 miles each session) hit the boxing bag and jump rope twice a week, and do yoga to stretch everything out once or twice a week. Most summer days, the girls and I end up at the pool in the afternoon, swimming and splashing. Relaxed hair doesn't last under that punishment-- and to keep it up, my stylist and I have a long and intimate relationship that has made me one of her best clients.

But more and more, I realize the waste of all this. Financially, it's silly-- that money could be better spent. Even if I still choose to spend it on myself in some way, I can think of better ways. A dance class, for example. Or cuter workout clothes. I might even put the cash aside for my "plastic surgery fund." Joking, really. Just joking.

Of course, I could choose hair over exercise... but this seems a shallow trade, given what we know about how exercise helps your brain, your body and adds years to your life. I once took a Facebook poll asking ladies which we'd rather have: perfect hair or a perfect body. Forty friends answered-- and no one voted for hair. But many of us choose not to exercise if it only improves an imperfect body-- and then only on the inside. I don't have a perfect body, but I do have perfect blood work, no major health issues and can still wear some clothes from ten years ago (Some, however, seem to have gotten mysterious tight in the waist. Hmmmm...) The point is exercise, for all its internal benefits, doesn't always create a bikini body. And let's face it, it's hard work! By comparison, a banging hairdo seems like instant gratification, instant improvement.

I might be persuaded that hair is worth the expense--even if the effect is short-lived-- if it weren't for...

2. I'm not really a "hair" woman in the first place. I've worn my hair about the same way (or the same couple of ways) all my life. I've never had a weave, never had braids, never done twists, never really experimented with much beyond color-- and I've stopped doing that, too. And while occasionally I cut my hair or grow it long, even those changes are in the same basic style.

Being that I'm not a hair person, I have very little ego about it. I think I may soon be one of those middle aged black women who cut her hair down to a short 'fro-- and went about her business, without feeling like I left my femininity on the salon floor.

I'm helped in feeling feminine with flowing tresses by...

3. My husband doesn't care. Most men like long hair on women, if you ask them. They find it sexy and alluring. Much has been written about the preference some black men have for black women whose hair is "dyed, fried and laid to the side." I don't have to go there: my husband's white. But I do think men, regardless of their ethnicity, find long hair to be feminine and attractive.

I expected that answer from Kevin-- and if it had mattered to him, his feeling about it would have factored into my decision. But when I asked him about it, his response was practical. "I think you spend too much time and money on it," he said. "I think it's much more important that you keep yourself in shape-- do I have to remind you we have a five year old? Besides, you always look good to me, so why are you messing with yourself?"

I love him. Not only does he say the right thing, he means it. His reply connects to the last piece of my decision to grow the relaxer, which is my own growing sense of personal identity, separate and a part from the expectations of our culture, which leads to...

4. Hair politics. I've never really thought of hair as a political statement. Hair to me has been mainly an adornment but I do appreciate the arguments of those who feel that we should love it exactly as it comes out of our heads. To me, this is not simply a racial issue, but a gender one. Women of most cultures feel the pressure to "do" their hair, whether that means curling, straightening, growing, dyeing, etc. Men just wash it and occasionally cut it... and it costs them far less in time, money and aggravation.

I want that freedom.

So, I'm transitioning. Right now I've got about an inch of new growth and I need to cut about an inch off the ends. Here are the visuals:

Before:




Today right after my workout--most of the length is slicked back:


Meanwhile, Sisi got her hair straigtened-- and that's fine with me. Her journey with her hair is hers: it's not for me to impose my journey on her. For different seasons, different hairstyles and different hair-raising adventures.

I'll update you on my hair journey in the weeks and months ahead.

Gender Roles and Gender Realities

I read an interesting book a couple of months (in case it isn't already obvious, I read a lot) called The Feminine Mistake.

The author posits that married women who choose the stay at home wife/Mom path do so at their financial peril. Given that 50% of marriages end in divorce, that single women with children make up a large component of the poor, that men die earlier than women, and that even when women work, they still make around 80 cents to every dollar men make. For many married women, a day comes when they will have to support themselves and their children alone. And once the children are out of the home, older women are still behind the financial eight ball. According to the Our Bodies, Ourselves Health Resource Center (www.ourbodiesourselves.com):

Women who are in the paid labor force earn less over our lifetime than do men. According to one estimate, the average 25-year-old working woman will lose about $455,000 to unequal pay during her lifetime, leaving her with less money to save, a smaller pension (if she has one at all), and lower Social Security benefits. After a lifetime of being unpaid, underpaid, or unemployed, it is no accident and no surprise that women 65 and over are almost twice as likely to live in poverty as older men.

A few weeks after I finished The Feminine Mistake, the findings of a recent Insight Committee for Community Economic Development study placed single black women at the bottom of the economic ladder with net worths that average $5, and for many amounts to a negative number-- meaning her debts eclipse any assets available she has. Marriage changes the equation, however. According to the Insight Center for Community Economic Development's "Lifting As We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America's Future," study:

...while marriage appears to ameliorate some economic hardship for both men and women across races, the data indicate that the positive effect of marriage on net worth is particularly amplified for black and Hispanic women.


The Feminine Mistake and the Insight Committee report seemed to make complimentary suggestions for wealth building for black women: marry, but don't quit your day job, just in case it doesn't work out.

This information comes into my hand at a time when I'm once again re-thinking my own career path and my "worth" but economic and otherwise. I gave up the "traditional workforce" almost ten years ago, leaving a comfortable job at a legal publishing company to strike out on my own. Since then, I've written eight books, done countless freelance projects of every kind imagineable-- but I'd hardly call my career a financial success. Rather, it's allowed me to explore my interests and be available to raise our two daughters.My husband makes the lion's share of the money that supports this household-- and if something happened to him, dramatic changes would be necessary. I'm certain I'm employable--I still have that Havard Law degree and nothing erases it-- but like the women interviewed in the Feminine Mistake--I'd almost be starting over in both experience and salary.

Lately, as publishing becomes increasingly uncertain and an expanding content market makes the margins of really making a living as a writer harder I think about my traditional work experiences. Making one's own money feels good. Interacting with other professionals can (sometimes) be deeply rewarding. And building a nest egg agagainst disasters is a very good think. Being financially independent again definitely appeals to me for all of the reasons explained in The Feminine Mistake-- and for the kinds of reasons outlined in a recent webinar sponsored by the Insight Committee for Community Economic Development. Black women having assets that our own to use, being financial independent helps us to further create our identity in the world-- and to carve out places of safety for the next generation.

This coin, however, has a flip side. Being married to a man who is willing and able to provide for us enables me to offer my girls a different kind of security. If I were to write a rebuttal to The Feminine Mistake, it would simply be this: for as long as both partners analyze their resources in ways that allow it and are willing to take the gamble, having a parent in the home offers intangible benefits that are as fulfilling as the economic ones of a salary. There are incalcuable benefits to this family that reach beyond dollars. Being around to talk to a teenaged daughter about the pressures of school, to take Lil Bit to the playground and buy ice cream, to prepare home made dinners, and create an unhurried environment helps to make our home a calm and peaceful refuge for us all. I feel these are worthwhile sacrifices in the short term and for as long as they are economically viable. Indeed, I think many women seek a life like mine, in which there is a balance of intellectual and renumerative pursuits combined with nesting and nurturing-- so do more and more men, but that's a different post.

The point is that until women are earning at the same rate as men, that childcare is free and shared between genders, and workplaces are structured in ways that allow parents to balance professional opportunity with family responsibility, women are likely to come out on the shortest end of the stick-- and single women with children are likely to see their assets continue to dwindle. Marriage alone certainly is a solution, but for many black women being unmarried with children adds to the wealth drain.

And as for me...my dilemma is solved by writing a bestseller and getting on Oprah! LOL!