Blue Hair

My daughter has blue hair. I blame myself.

She was born a brunette, in Wales. From day one, she had a full, thick head of dark hair that made the other mothers on the ward exclaim in amazement. For some reason, almost all the other babies were as bald as eagles; the only other babies born with hair were either Indian or Pakistani. "How come yours has all that hair?" one mother asked me. "That's rare, isn't it?" All I could do was shrug. "I'm American," I told her, and she gave me a look that said Well, that explains it.

When she was four months old, my daughter's hair began to change color. One day I looked at her and got the shock of my life: her hair seemed to be turning grey. Grey hair at four months! I asked her pediatrician about this and he laughed. "Can't you tell? She's a blonde. Her hair color is changing, that's all." Looking closely, I saw that he was right. I have brown hair; my husband's hair used to be black. His father was a blonde and so were most of the members of my family, but they weren't with us to explain to people who inquired "Where does that blonde hair come from?" I never got up the courage to joke about the milkman, but I was often tempted.

When our daughter was nine months old, we moved back to Japan, by which time her hair was completely blonde. One of the things I learned to say upon arriving back was recessive trait -- kakusei iden in Japanese. Whenever a conversation started about my daughter's blonde hair, I trotted out kakusei iden and hoped that would explain it. I'm not sure whether anyone believed me, but I felt I'd done my bit. I can't tell you how many times I heard strangers remarking on my daughter's hair and mine and how different we were from each other. Few people realized I would understand.

People make a big fuss over blondes. I ought to know: I'm the only brunette child in a family of blondes. Just look at your beautiful blonde daughters! people would exclaim to my mother. I knew from her frozen smile that she was aware of the subtext I was getting: Brunettes aren't exciting.

If I'd had my way, though, I'd have had black hair. Hair the color of a crow's wing, coal black, India ink. Brown is blah, and blondes may have more fun, but black hair always seemed to me to be the epitome of style and crispness, a whole rainbow of colors in one. So on that fateful day when my daughter was five and asked me what color of hair I preferred, she caught me off guard. Stupidly I did not realize that what she asked me was the child's equivalent of Does my butt look big in these trousers? I blew it.

"Mommy," she began, "which do you want, blonde hair or black hair?" I was cooking dinner and absorbed in what I was doing, and I didn't stop to think about her underlying question. Do you love me the way I am, or do you want me to look like everyone else? "Personally, I'd like black," I said, testing the soup. She ran crying from the room.

I tried to make it up to her. I told her how beautiful her hair was, how good it looked on her. How I'd grown up the odd one out in my family, how I'd always wished my hair was a different color, and wasn't that silly? No dice. Everyone else in her class had black hair, and I'd just confirmed my own preference.

For the past ten-plus years, my daughter has been longing to dye her hair. Not black, but blue. The other day she went into the bathroom and did this. When she came out, her hair was blue all right, but not a pretty blue. It was more the blue of a crayon that has spent a lot of time rattling around in the box with its fellow crayons. A rather dirty, dingy blue. I could weep.

She says she's thrilled. She swears that the only reason she has blue hair is because she wanted to see what it would look like.

I blame myself.