Can I be honest?

I mourn for my daughter's hair. I KNOW it's no big deal. I KNOW she's cute, even bald. It's nothing to do with me being embarrassed by her. I just mourn that my baby doesn't have the thick, dark, kinky, long curls that she "should" have.

It makes me MAD at HIV. I feel like this is the one thing that this stupid virus has robbed from her. I hate it! My baby deserves thick beautiful kinky hair! She deserves corn rows and hair product and pretty beads. And the stupid HIV has stolen it.

I know her hair will eventually grow in. I see that it is growing, very slowly. But I honestly think it will be years before she doesn't have bald spots. Her receding hairline goes back to her ears. She's just got a little mohawk-looking strip of hair on the top front of her head. And on the back of her head (where her head would hit the pillow) she's got another huge bald spot. Even though the very top is almost an inch long now, we are forever away from being about to make nice pretty long cornrows that go from the front to the back of her head. It would be like trying to connect Florida and Haiti with a land bridge--just too much space between!

I massage Kendi's head each night, almost willing her hair to grow. She doesn't know the difference now, but in a few years she will. At least a few times each week I dream of doing her hair when it is full and thick and long. I dream of her rockin a fro like her Eban House friend Fia (hair to die for, that one has!).

I purchase hair products sometimes, trying to convince myself she has enough hair to use them with. The hair she does have has no defined curl or kink. It's like....it's like dry, brittle, "fried" hair--like hair would look after it had been used and abused for years. I recently bought Uncle Funky's Daughter curl cream because, really, how could I refused that name?! Maybe this will be the magic stuff that makes the hair she does have as beautiful as it can be.

Kendi's little body endured so much poison before she was born. It endured alcohol and drugs daily. Her little body even held on when she was poisoned with DTT insecticide. There are reasons her hair is this way. Thank God this is the ONLY "leftover" from the abuse she endured. That in itself is a miracle. I'm so thankful that the only "price" she had to pay was her hair. But I'm still pretty ticked off that she had to "pay" anything at all! She was the innocent in this.

Sometimes I think about what we will all be like in Heaven. I want to believe that, if we have physical bodies at all, they will be our "ideal" physical bodies--the ones that God designed before the abuses we go through on earth. I can't wait to see my baby girls full rich head of hair in heaven.

Vent over,

Anita