Sunday Scribblings: Hair

With this week's Sunday Scribblings' Hair prompt, I couldn't pass up a chance to reflect upon one of the mysteries in my life, namely my daughter's hair. As you can see from the above photo, Pea's blonde hair is as different from the twins' dark brown heads as night and day. See, I'm a Filipina with dark brown hair and Alfie is English with light brown hair (his hair was white-blonde as a child but it darkened). Even though my mother, who is part Spanish, is quite fair, we expected the laws of the dark-haired dominant gene to apply. We expected all our kids to have the coloring that 3Po and Jammy do. But we got Pea.

I'll never forget the day she was born, when I was huffing and puffing and struggling to push her out of the birth canal; Pea's head was just beginning to crown when my obstetrician and the nurses suddenly exclaimed, "She's blonde!". I was delirious with pain and ignored it at first, but they finally convinced me to take a mirror and see for myself.

In the six years since The Pea was born, I've gotten used to the sidelong glances and inquiries, "Is she with you?"; "Is she your daughter?"; "Oh, she's your daughter!". So many people comment and compliment her on her fairness that I'm worried she's starting to think that dark coloring is somehow undesirable! She recently told me she didn't want to go to the Philippines for vacation because she was afraid she would get dark. I gently told her we would do everything we could to keep her skin from burning in the hot sun, but having dark coloring is just as beautiful as being fair, and many fair people actually wish they were a little darker. I told her that in all likelihood, her hair would darken as she grew older.

Well, we've been waiting for it to darken for six years, and it hasn't happened yet.

For more takes on hair, click here.