When my mother was pregnant with me, she prayed for a baby girl with curly hair that would sit on her daddy's knee.

She says that when I was barely born, I had perfect little ripples of silky down on my head.

Thanks, Mom. That was the first and last time my hair was perfect.

It was easy for her to want curly hair for me. She never had curly hair. Her attempts to manage her own dark straight hair consisted of keeping it cut short and stabbing at it with a curling iron every once in a while.

Her first three children were boys. They didn't want hair-do's. I, however, was a problem she had no answer for. She tried to brush my matted mop in the morning before she sent me to pre-school. As a mother of four, she was always running late, and had to rip the comb through the impossible knots. I would cry because it hurt. Mom cried too.

If only it ended there. I would see all the other girls in their cute little hair-do's. Barettes and bows and pig-tails. Pigtails really were the thing in kindergarten. "Mommy, why can't I have pigtails like all the other girls?"

My mother did not state the obvious, which was: "You need to have hair that obeys the laws of gravity for pigtails. Your hair hovers around your head like a dust cloud." No, mom was going to help her baby girl if she could. She bought me powder blue puffy yarn ties, you know the kind, and took a comb and determination to my head.

The hard-won results were a part dividing the left and right hemispheres of my head and two buoyant spheres anchored by blue yarn bows. When I looked in the mirror, I was astonished at their size and fluffiness. But, like a good hairdresser, mom sold me on the idea that it was supposed to look like that. "You have two puffballs! You look so cute!" She was truly enthusiastic, and complimented and cooed over me. I finally believed her.

But then I had to face my brothers.

When they saw me leave the bathroom-turned-beauty-salon, they stopped dead in their tracks. "What did you do to your hair?"

I raised my chin. "I have pigtails, " I said with imperious 5-year-old pride.

It was a decisive moment. My brother Mark said, "I bet your shadow would look just like Mickey Mouse."

That was a happy prospect. We all went to find a lamp to check. It was true!

Fortified with my family's approval and my mother's delight, I could shrug off the taunts at school.