Becoming (INSECURE SEQUEL)

14

Kali is ten years old, she has brown eyes, long brown hair--well it'll be short any minute now when the hairdresser cuts it-- a crooked smile, and a frail build. She rarely smiles, but when she does, I notice that she does with her mouth closed. I can't tell if it's done out of habit or if she's trying to hide her teeth; either way, she does it because at some point in her juvenile life she has grown to feel self conscious.

It makes me sad because she's too young to care about that stuff. She's too young to know that the world is made of  hypercritical common folk who care what your smile looks like. I guess it almost makes me angry. It unsettles me enough that you would think I've never been ten to know how mean and insensitive little kids can be. That's why I'll make sure that my children never are that way.

I'll make sure that they don't care if a person is wearing new shoes or shoes that their older brother used to play soccer in. I'll really be sure to teach them not to ever make fun of a person for something that they were born with, that's almost a different level of cruel: judging people for things that they did not choose to have. I hope everyone who looks in the mirror after laughing at the way a person's teeth, skin, or face looks know that they're the worst type of person.

"What do you want to do next?" I turn to her as she sits in the chair.

I look at her, but she's looking up at my hair. I get nervous when people stare at the parts of me that I'm not too sure about, but of course I try to hide those nerves. As much as I like to think I've gotten rid of all my self-doubts, I can't help but to feel diffident.

"I like your hair like that." She says to me, her voice unreadable. She doesn't sound too excited or too grim.

"Thank you." I smile.

I kind of feel fake thanking her for liking my hair when I'm in the middle of getting it changed. I remember I used to care so much about what people saw when they looked at me, and for a long time I thought that they saw messy hair and nothing else. I suppose it comes from not going to high school with many people that looked like me. None of them stopped to consider that maybe my hair was supposed to be big and curly, but that it was a flaw caused by some form of my incompetence. Throughout adulthood, I never cared to change it, but now I do. Somewhere in between, I forgot to ask myself if there was ever anything wrong with it to begin with.

"Why don't you just keep it like that?" She shrugs like the choice is obvious.

I sigh and shrug back at her. "Like the rest of us, I guess there are parts of myself that I still need to learn to love."

I only tell her the way I did so she knows it's okay to not like everything about yourself. However, what would I be showing her by changing what I don't like?

"Well why are you changing it?" She speaks like she's read my mind by looking at me. "If we're supposed to love ourselves and all that."

I can tell she thinks I'm full of it, which is why I won't bother to give her some lazy response about confidence. She has questions and it's clear to me that she knows enough for me to not be sugar coating everything I say.

"because the standards that society sets for you arent real. If all it takes is an hour or a few dollars to change what they tell you is bad, it says more about the fragility of those standards than it does you." I explain. "They're not real and we should do what we want to without finding a way to feel bad about it."

"Oh." She shrugs.

After that, she doesn't ask me any more questions, but I wish that she would. I'd be happy to answer her. I want her to get to know more about me just as I want to know more about her. My only fear is that if we end up getting too close and she has to leave or something, I won't know what to do. Right now, I'm  helping her because she needs it, she doesn't see me as her mother or anything.