Learning to swim

My kid loves the water. She is taking lessons at Tacoma's Eastside Pool, the only pool in the area with Saturday lessons for children her age, as well as the one with the cheapest rates. She took their tot class last summer, and is now in their Level 1 swim class.

We attended a birthday pool party for one of her friends on Sunday. My daughter turned down eating lunch so she could stay in the water, came out of the pool long enough to sing happy birthday to her friend, and then jumped right back in.

I really want her to learn how to swim, in part because I can't. You may have heard about the six teens who drowned in Shreveport, LA last week when they jumped into a river to cool off from the oppressive heat. This article about the tragedy is one of many that notes that nearly 70% of black children in the U.S. can't swim, compared to only 42% of white children, and that African-Americans drown at much higher rates than do whites.

There are many reasons for the racial disparity in swimming ability, including historical segregation and current poverty which made and make it difficult or impossible to have access to pools and opportunities to learn to swim. Add to that the fear factor: when adults never had the chance to learn to swim, they are more likely to be fearful of the water and thus not allow their children to go near it.

My first opportunity in the water occurred when I was seven and my mother signed me up for lessons at the YMCA. There had to be at least fifty children in the class, so the instructors had no time to give individual attention to anyone. Instead, they demonstrated and explained certain techniques, and you either got it or you didn't. I learned to hold my breath under water in that class. (Even in my daughter's class, which only has ten kids, there is little time for individual attention. The instructor works with each child for about three or four minutes, while the rest of the kids play in the water).

My next chance occurred in seventh grade, when I took a semester of swimming as part of gym class. However, the swim teacher was a diabetic who was going through some serious complications, and he missed most of the semester. The substitute who replaced him declared each class "open swim," so we were never taught anything. A friend of mine taught me how to float in that class.

In tenth grade, I also had a chance to take a semester of swimming as part of gym. The swim teacher was well-known as an excellent instructor. But early in the semester, a kid lit up a cigarette in the gym, tossed it on a mat and set the place on fire. The gym, a separate building from the school, had so much smoke damage that they had to close it down for the remainder of the year. We spent the rest of our gym periods doing calisthenics in the basement of the school until it was warm enough to play a few sports outside. I never again had room in my school schedule (high school or college) to take gym.

The rest of my family can swim, but they all learned as adults. After her children were grown and out of the house, my mother signed up for swimming lessons and kept taking them until she learned. My dad and brother both learned to swim in the military. My sister learned to swim in college. Lucky woman, she could take swimming as a credit elective at her university. I didn't have that option.

As an adult, I never took independent swim classes because, I hate to admit, I was worried about my hair. When relaxed hair gets wet it tends to frizz up, which doesn't look so hot when you're a working professional. Straightening it out again requires several hours involving dryers, flat irons and curling irons. As such, swimming lessons seemed like more trouble than they were worth.

During the few times over the years I had the chance to get into a pool, I taught myself how to kick while floating, and I can make it across the shallow end of the pool that way. Still, that's hardly competent swimming. My husband, on the other hand, used to be a lifeguard.

So here's hoping that my daughter's love of the water will continue, and that she will become an expert swimmer. And perhaps her mother will, too. Learning to swim is not a hair challenge anymore, since I no longer relax my hair and don't care if it gets wets, but it is a time and schedule challenge. I would love nothing more, however, than being able to join my daughter in the water.

Another reason to go natural

A blog I follow, The Black Snob, posted this story today about supermodel Naomi Campbell losing her hair. The blogger, Danielle Campbell, writes that Naomi Campbell is only a very visible example of a common phenomenon:

I know too many black women who have receding hairlines, severe hair breakage or who have gone bald as they got older due to alopecia. Usually these things are caused by harsh chemical relaxers or too-tight cornrows or heavy hair extensions.

Like the blogger, I had always had very thick hair, and it had been thinning and receding after years of using chemical relaxers. My main reasons for choosing to go natural were because of my concerns about what the harsh chemicals and toxins in relaxers were doing to my body and the environment, and to set an example for my daughter so she would know that her natural hair is beautiful.

Going natural seems to be spreading, at least in my circles. My sister, my college roommate, and the mother of the only other black child in my daughter's daycare, are all people I know who have gone natural in the last few years. And as the Black Snob notes, it's not really a political statement. It's about embracing our natural beauty, saving our bodies, saving the environment, and yes, saving our hair.

Reading "No Impact Man"... and straightening my daughter's hair

Bear with me, they're connected!

When my sister, who lives in New York City, told me a couple months ago that she had attended the book signing of Colin Beavan's No Impact Man, it just didn't occur to me that she might purchase a signed copy for me! I was surprised and thrilled to receive the book as a Christmas present from her.

One of the early lessons of Beavan's "No Impact" experiment that he highlights in the first few chapters is that living sustainably should not be about asceticism. Instead, Beavan asked whether or not our consumerist, throw-away lifestyle is making us happy, and if not, could he and his family find a way, via low impact living, to become happier and more fulfilled?

Armed with these thoughts, I spent the day after Christmas... at the mall. I have mentioned before that my husband is 6'7", and thus can't generally find clothing his size second-hand, so we went as a family to see if he could take advantage of the post-Christmas sales to make some purchases he needed.

While hubby shopped, my daughter and I strolled the mall. I can't even remember the last time we went to a mall--it's been well over a year. My daugther, like many children her age, is into the "gimme" stage, but the item that caught her fancy the most surprised me. We stopped at several of the kiosks in the middle of the mall to check out their products, and at one, a woman selling high-end flat irons straightened out a lock of hair on each of our heads.

My daughter was delighted and wanted me to buy the flat iron. At the post-Christmas 50% off price of $120, it was still well our of my price range. But daughter knew I have a similar item at home, and asked if I would do her hair with it when we got home. I promised I would.

I haven't used my flat iron in the past year since I stopped relaxing my hair, and I've never used it on my daughter's hair. Of course, mine is a rather low-end version, so it took several go-overs to straighten her hair. She loved the final result, however, asking me if her hair would stay like this.

"No," I said. "It will last a couple of days, or until it gets wet, whichever comes first."

"But Hannah's hair stays like this all the time!" she objected. (Hannah is her best buddy from day care).

"Well, Hannah has a very different type of hair than you do," I explained. "But let me tell you a little secret: people LOVE your hair. People pay lots of money to have hair like yours."

Maybe it's not such a secret: she gets complimented on her hair almost every time we got out. Like her mother, she has super thick, super-curly hair in an unusual color: a honey brown with dark brown, auburn and platinum highlights. Add that to her beautiful face and she's very striking. My hair was something I hated as a child, because it was hard to comb (although thanks to my homemade detangler, it's getting easier to comb both our heads), and because it made me different. It took years of hearing hair dressers say to me, "Boy, I wish I could bottle your hair color/texture and sell it," for me to believe my hair was beautiful.

I hope that my daughter will grow up appreciating her hair, and yet I want her to have the flexibility of styling her hair different ways, even straightening it if she chooses, in ways that are non-chemical and non-toxic. In a variation of No Impact Man's musings, I don't want her to be an ascetic about her hair. I want her to feel like she can have fun with her hair, try new things, etc., in ways that are healthy for her and the planet--AND while being proud of herself the way she is, as a young black girl (and someday, woman).

I remember reading a NIM blog post in which Beavan's daughter, who is the same age (4 1/2 years old) as my daughter, asked if she could eat meat like her friends. Beavan and his wife are vegetarians. He said, "Yes"--because he wants her to choose for herself. She tried meat and didn't like it.

So like Beavan, part of my journey has to be about setting an example for my daughter, but letting her choose for herself.

A few more thoughts on "Princess and the Frog" (SPOILER ALERT!)

Warning: unlike my last post, which was just a general review, this one contains quite a few spoilers.

These thoughts are about the ongoing discussion of Prince Naveen's race. First, to the objection of some that by making Naveen "other," the movie missed a chance to portray a positive black male: I wholeheartedly disagree. The most important role model in Tiana's life is her father, and although he only appears in the beginning of the movie (he dies in WWI), his memory, his love, his life lessons, and his dreams stay with Tiana throughout her life, motivating her in all she does.

Second, and this came up in a discussion I had on another blog: at the end of the movie, you see Tiana and Naveen, now married, fulfilling her dream of opening a French Quarter restaurant. I think the filmmakers' intent was to once more reverse the "princess" stereotype: instead of Tiana giving up her dreams in order to get married and live happily ever after as simply a princess bride, Naveen instead becomes part of her life, helping her to fulfill her pre-marriage dreams.

Whether or not the filmmakers realized this (and they may have, given that the movie's screenwriter is black), there is something else significant about this ending besides the feminist reversal. By remaining in New Orleans and helping Tiana open her restaurant, Naveen basically made a decision to become a black man. What I mean is, in the eyes of the law and society at the time, once he married Tiana and stayed in NOLA, he would have been considered black. The privileges he had at the beginning of the movie due to his ambiguous ethnicity and royal status would have disappeared. He gave them, for her. And that's romantic!

Update: another blogger discussing this was offended that Tiana and Naveen are shown at the end doing the manual labor to refurbish the building that becomes the restaurant. To her, that showed that Tiana ends up just as poor and struggling as she was at the beginning of the movie, unlike the other Disney princesses, who end up pampered and wealthy beyond dreams.

As you might guess, I disagree with this interpretation, too. First, I think the purpose of showing them doing the labor is to portray how much Naveen had changed from the lazy, spoiled young man he was at the beginning. And second, the manual labor (on a building they own) is just an intermediate step on the way to having a very successful restaurant, as you also see at the end. I suspect that while they'll always have to work hard, Tiana and Naveen would end up making quite a bit of money with their restaurant. (And there is quite a precedence for some hardworking black entrepreneurs becoming very rich and successful, even in the Jim Crow era, despite humble beginnings: Madame C.J. Walker, John H. Johnson, among others). So, being a black woman from that era in American history, Tiana would probably never have the "fairy tale" ending of the typical princess tale (and she didn't expect to), but she wouldn't end up poor and struggling. She'd find herself squarely within the black bourgeoisie.

Update 2: I really liked the fact that the movie showed a little of Tiana and Naveen's married life, with him even having a line where he refers to her as "my wife." I don't think any of the other Disney princess movies show that, even in their direct to DVD sequels, with one exception: The Little Mermaid 2, which is about Ariel and Eric's 12-year-old daughter, who, in a reversal of her mother's story, dreams of being a mermaid.

Yeah, I'm thinking way too hard about this, LOL!

I loved the Princess and the Frog!

I blogged about this movie when I first learned about it earlier this year, and now I've seen it during its opening weekend. My husband and I took our daughter today as a special treat (she has been to two movies at the theater before today--Madagascar 2 and Charlotte's Web--and wasn't able to sit through either of them in their entirety). But sitting through this movie was no problem; my daughter was enchanted.

I have a standard for evaluating whether or not I love, rather than simply like, a movie: if I immediately want to see the movie again, I loved it. By this standard, I absolutely loved The Princess and the Frog!

So many things were wonderful about it: beautiful animation, somewhat great music (more on that in the next paragraph), a wonderful heroine who is also a role model (I don't consider any of the Disney princesses role models, except for Mulan, and to a lesser degree, Belle; Tiana, however, is a great one), a hero who changes for the better, and a plot that upends the traditional fairy tale story. More on that as well.

One of my only disappointments is the music. It seems weird to write that, because the music was amazing in many ways, filled with the sounds of New Orleans jazz and gospel. And Aniki Noni Rose, who is the voice of Tiana, is an incredible singer. The problem is that the songs weren't memorable, not in the way that "Be Our Guest" from Beauty and the Beast, "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid, and "Circle of Life" from The Lion King (and at least one or two other songs from each movie) were. I walked out of the theater and couldn't remember any of the songs, except for "Evangeline," a lovely ballad sung by the Cajun firefly Ray.

I have to add a comment about Ray. I read one review in which the reviewer noted that her biggest concern prior to seeing the movie was that Ray, a snaggled-toothed firefly, would be the worst of stereotypes, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he wasn't. I agree. He was actually one of the movie's sweetest, most endearing characters, and it's fitting that the movie's most romantic song was sung by him.

One other major comment I have is about the ethnicity of the movie's hero, Prince Naveen. I noted in my earlier post about this movie that some were already complaining that he wasn't black (FWIW, it's not a complaint I share), and I've seen several comments since then expressing the wish that Disney, while giving black girls a role model, had also given black boys a role model by making the hero a black prince. Instead, the character is brown-skinned; his name is Sanskrit; the actor voicing him is Brazilian; his accent is Spanish; the character speaks English, French, and something that sounds made up; and his nationality (Maldonian), is also made up.

In other words, the filmmakers deliberately made his ethnicity ambiguous, and having seen the movie, I think they made the right call. This goes back to what I said above about the movie upending traditional fairy tale themes. If you've seen the preview, you know that when Tiana kisses the frog, instead of breaking the spell and having him turn back to a prince, she becomes a frog instead. This is due to the fact that according to the original story, a princess must kiss the frog and Tiana is not a princess; she is a waitress.

The story does have a princess, though; a blond white girl named Lottie who is the daughter of one of New Orleans' richest men and who is also the Mardi Gras princess. And if the story followed a traditional arc, she would be the one to break the spell. Naveen wants her to, and even before he is transformed into a frog, he is trying to woo her. The fact that it's not the actual "princess" who wins the prince, and it's only when it no longer matters to Naveen that Tiana's not that he wins her heart, is part of the movie's charm.

This, then, is the principal reason Naveen could not have been black. Lottie's father accepts Tiana's friendship with his daughter, something not uncommon in the South--white children who were friends with the black children of people who worked for their parents (although having those friendships survive into adulthood was much less likely). Nevertheless, there is no way a wealthy white man in 1920's New Orleans would have accepted a black man wooing his daughter. But a wealthy, foreign prince of indeterminate ethnicity? In that case, I could imagine him overlooking a little brown skin.

It's interesting how Disney kept race in the background. At only one point do they reference it--and then indirectly. Tiana dreams of opening her own restaurant, working two jobs and carefully saving all her tips. When she has enough for the downpayent on a building, the bankers tell her that someone else has outbid her for the structure and only if she pays the full price in cash will they sell it to her. Well, it's bull--the building is in shambles and needs so much work that it's doubtful anyone besides Tiana wants it. But you really know the bankers are lying by what they tell her next: something along the lines of, "A young lady of your background shouldn't think she can have her own restaurant and rise above her station."

One of the most pleasant surprises was how romantic the story was. The movie made me believe that the two principal characters were falling in love, and the ending, with what they are willing to change and sacrifice for each other, cements it. And unlike the typical Disney princess movie, their kisses have chemistry! In addition, the movie had great messages about hard work being necessary to make dreams come true, and love and family being the most important things one can have in their life. This is the type of movie that I think adults would enjoy even without a child accompanying them. It was completely satisfying and I, for one, can't wait to own it and watch it again and again.

Of princesses and politics

Although I said when I started that I'd be talking about more than just "green" issues, this is my first post that really veers from that. So I'll mention a few green things to start: my spinach and tomatoes are sprouting, but my lettuce is doing horribly. Hubby bought some green bean plant starts, and I think I might have to do that with lettuce. On the plus side, our bird feeder is paying off. My daughter and I have been able to watch chickadees, sparrows, robins and even a dove come visit!

So the point of this post: Daughter turned four on Saturday, and had two parties: one in a park in the morning with some family friends with two daughters, and a sleepover with two of her friends from daycare on Saturday night. They all had a blast!

My daughter, like all the little girls mentioned above, is really into Disney princess stuff. Now, I happen to think Belle and Mulan are pretty cool; the rest of the princesses I have mixed feelings about, but not enough to ban her from it. However, I have noticed, and the friend with the two daughters above and I discussed the fact that on most of the Disney paraphenalia, the "princesses of color" (Mulan, Pocahontas, and Jasmine) are often left out. Jasmine is sometimes included, but Mulan and Pocahontas, almost never. I have to wonder why. Even Sleeping Beauty, who is the most useless and passive of the bunch (and therefore the least likely for a young girl to want to emulate) appears on almost all the princess merchandise.

I just learned today that later this year, Disney is introducing its first African-American princess, Tiana, in the animated, "The Princess and the Frog." I have to wonder whether she will continue to appear prominently on princess paraphenalia after the movie has gone from the theaters, or if she will be left out like Mulan, Pocahontas and Jasmine.

I read a few discussions about the new Disney movie, including the fact that Tiana's love interest is possibly white (the cartoon character is dark-haired and olive skinned, the actor voicing him Brazilian; btw, I have no problem with the character being white or "other"), and others which talk about the importance of this movie as a role model for black children, especially girls. In the latter case, some mention the famous doll study used as part of the evidence in the Brown v. Board of Education case. This study has been repeated recently, with similar results: black children preferring white dolls to black ones.

Anyway, it makes me wonder what, if anything, I should be teaching my daughter about race. I don't remember my parents teaching me anything specific, but I remember often preferring black dolls as a child. My favorite set were the Happy Family (scroll down on this page to view them), who I loved not just because they were black but because they also had black hair texture, unlike, say, black Barbies. But I grew up in a predominantly black environment. My daughter, if we continue to live where we live now, will grow up in a majority white (~70%) community.

Right now, she makes observations about people that are just statements of fact, unconnected to politics or sociology. "Daddy is brown, and Mommy, you and me are yellow," she says. A little girl at her daycare is Chinese, she observes, and a boy there has two mommies. Right now, there's nothing remarkable about these facts to her, and I'd love for it to stay that way--where people are people, and their differences are just interesting facts about them.

But I wonder if that's possible. I remember talking with the teenage daughter of a friend a few years ago, who told me about the tensions at her high school between kids of different races. It made me sad, especially when I think of my own high school years in the 1980's, during which, even amid the turmoil of recent desegregation, the kids of different races got along fairly well. (It was the racism of some teachers that was the bigger problem).

And I wonder what Disney is communicating when they make movies about diverse characters but then cut them out of their merchandise. Just food for thought.