The Beauty is in the Acceptance

LUV's first guest blogger is Crystal Maldonado a girl facing the roughest of obstacles, alike the rest of us. Beauty is in the acceptance. Maturity is in the understanding. Just 2 of the many lessons Crystal teaches us as our June LUVgirl! 

“Can I play with it?”  It was a question I got a lot. As a brown girl – 1/2 Puerto Rican, 1/4 Polish, 1/8 Italian, 1/8 French (Canadian, if that matters) – living in a predominantly middle-class, white town, my hair was always a topic of discussion. To me, it was hardly special. Not really curly, sort of wavy, definitely not straight. And brown – not chestnut, not cinnamon not oak – just brown.

My classmates loved it; I did not. In fact, when my kindergarten teacher asked the class to draw a self-portrait at the start of the year, I drew myself as a blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl. 

“That’s not what you look like,” my mom said added. “But that’s pretty!” I’d protest, convinced that my brown hair and dark eyes somehow were not. 

I failed to understand why my classmates enjoyed my hair so much when I couldn’t stand it. They wanted to stroke it, braid it, fluff it, pamper it. They wanted to tie it back and twirl it around a finger. They wanted to close their palms around the thickness of my ponytail and compare it to their own! 

I suspect this had much to do with the fact that I was the brownest person they’d ever known. I was exotic, but not threatening. My hair – and by extension, me – was on display for my peers to examine, though they were always very kind. 

“I love your hair curly,” they’d gush, wrapping a ringlet around their finger. “I wish my hair was ever so curly.”

I was dumbfounded. As much as I relished in the attention (I yearned for anything to make me feel accepted), how could they not want their flowing, golden locks?

How could they want something that I – a chubby, brown girl with glasses – had?

Couldn’t they see how much I longed to be just like them? To look anything like them? Couldn’t they understand that, in kindergarten, I’d forced my mom every single day to untangle my hair and tie it back or braid it so I could pretend my hair was as silky and lovely as DJ Tanner’s on “Full House”? Or how, in third grade, I’d gotten so fed up with the mop on my head that I’d stopped combing through the tangles and let it turn into such an unruly mess, that it actually snapped a hair tie in half while I was giving a presentation in front of the classroom?

Even straightening my hair didn’t make me love it. It either wasn’t straight enough or didn’t fall on my shoulders perfectly. The texture appearing too rough. It wasn’t the beautiful mane I’d wished for as a kid.

I spent an ungodly amount of time wishing my hair – and the rest of me, too – looked more like the celebrities on television or the girls in the classroom (who were usually white, while I was only half, but did not look it).

I started to lose hope. And when I realized I wouldn’t magically wake up one morning with perfect hair on my head, I stubbornly decided it was time to make the most of it. I started to look into how I could ‘tame’ my ‘wild’ locks. I discovered how to use hair products. Learned the purpose of a diffuser. Realized that combing my hair made it frizzy and that letting it air dry and develop into curled ringlets worked a lot more efficiently than washing my hair before bed and waking up looking like a cat had exploded on my head.

It was a struggle. But I managed. And in time, I started to become okay with my brown, wavy mane! It was slow. Very, very, slow. But now? Well, now, I let it hang in all of its curly glory. And I like it. Love it, even. Some days I still wish it was as smooth, straight and perfect as Jennifer Aniston’s, but mostly, I realize now that no matter how badly I hoped I’d someday wake up and look exactly like that yellow-haired, blue-eyed drawing I first made in kindergarten, it was the second picture I’d drawn – of the pudgy, round-bodied, squiggly-haired, brown girl – I should have embraced all along.