My mind wandered right back to the pretty girls who always had boyfriends. The pretty girls always got what they wanted from their parents. The pretty girls were smarter and richer and got better grades. With this face and these lips, I thought, I was just always going to be on the outside, lookin’ in.
There was a lot of drama at my house when I was twelve years old. Truth is, I had a lot to learn. My mother used to suffer through those nights when I went to her cryin’ and screamin’ about my looks. I told her that I hated myself. “I got big lips, I’m too skinny, and it makes it hard for me! I can’t take it!” I used to say. I was giving her an awful time. Mama didn’t know what to do with me. I could hear her praying for me at night when she thought I was asleep. She would come into my room and pray over my sleeping head.
My mother would always tell me that I was as pretty as any other girl. When I would complain, she would say, “Fantasia, don’t worry about it.” I would say, “But I’m skinny!” And she would say, “Don’t worry about it! God made you skinny so you could move through life easier.” I would say, “I hate my lips!” And she would say, “Don’t worry about it! God gave you those lips so that you could sing better.” I would say, “I have no chest!” She would say, “Don’t worry about it, God gave you a little chest, but he gave you big lungs and a big gift. He couldn’t give you everything so he gave you what you could use.”
As difficult as those moments were with my mother, what she was tellin’ me started to sink in. I realized that there were things that I couldn’t change about myself and there were things that I could do something about. My mother told me to take the qualities that I had and work with them. She used to always quote this famous prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I decided I was going to stop complainin’ about the things I couldn’t change and just “work it,” like Mama used to say. So, when I was about twelve or thirteen I became a girl who was into fashion and hair. I wore all kinds of crazy outfits and my mother let me do it. Blue fingernail polish, food coloring in my hair, ripped T-shirts. Anything that said I was “in da house.” I did all kinds of things to my hair: it was slicked down, standing on end, braided on the sides—anything just to stand out and let people know that ’Tasia was as good as those pretty girls.
I looked at magazines all the time. The magazines were filled with models and pretty girls, and I looked at them every time I could get my hands on one. I would get them from the garbage or if they were left on a seat at the doctor’s office or, once in a while, Mama would even buy me one. I never was able to read the articles, but I was only interested in how everyonelooked. I would stand in the mirror and pose like them and try to smile like them and hold my head the way they did. I somehow thought that if I read those magazines enough, somehow I would start looking like some of them.
My mother tells a story about the day I was in the eighth grade and went to school in one of my self-made outfits. It was a denim shirt tied up around my belly button with rips torn into the sleeves and back. I also had a denim miniskirt that I had redesigned by cutting the bottom off the skirt and then taking what little was left and cutting the fabric on a diagonal so it ended right below my panty line. When I came into our yellow kitchen on Montlieu Avenue that morning in my outfit, my mother was shocked. Her mouth just hung open. She couldn’t get any words out. She knew how sensitive I was about my appearance, so she didn’t say what she wanted to say and let me go to school like that. Mama knew what would happen. So I went to school in my “hot to trot” denim outfit, fishnet stockings, and stack-heeled shoes. When I returned home that afternoon a little earlier than usual, my mother saw that I had tied someone else’s jacket around my waist, covering all that needed to be hidden. My mother laughed to herself and asked, “Fantasia, why are you wearing that shirt around your waist?” Humbly, I said, “All the kids at school laughed at me and told me to cover up!” My mother had known, but she wanted me to learn for myself when being “too cute” wasn’t “cute.”
That evening after dinner, Mama came into my room to talk to me about what happened at school that day. I cried to her, telling her that I thought my outfit was like the clothes that I saw in the magazines. I told her that it hurt me that the girls and guys were laughing about my ripped T-shirt and my skirt that was too short and the hem was crooked. I pleaded with Mama to tell me what had gone wrong, because I didn’t understand. Everyone knew that I was different and liked looking unusual like the models.
Mama explained to me that that my outfit was trying too hard to be something that I wasn’t. She said that what everyone could see in that outfit was fakeness. She said, “Everyone knows you ’Tasia. They all grew up with you. They know you are not like
