"Ugly Head"

Juli who is my good friend and boss at the dance studio, forwarded an email to me yesterday, here it is (I substituted a different name):

Juli - I wanted to make you aware of a situation that happened tonight in my daughter's dance class. Sue attends the 5pm TBJ class with Michelle. Sue told me that as they were lining up a girl, Ahkeela (sp?) told her that she was an "ugly head". Sue responded by saying "that isn't nice"which was received by an "I don't care". I guess I am not so disturbed by this one instance but Sue and other girls have been verbally attacked by her before. I know that Michelle is aware of this since I brought it to her attention before Christmas. I am not sure what you want to do with this information but I thought you should know. Thanks for listening.

Obviously she is talking about my Akila. Juli responded by saying that Akila has behavioral issues and they were aware of the problem and working with the parents who were very cooperative. Thanks for letting us know and continue to inform us of problems. This is her response in a nutshell. I said you can't say "behavioral issues", you have to say "brain damage". Otherwise I am just a bad parent, which is what we know most people think. Anyway, I told Juli I thought it was time I write a letter to the parents of the class giving them some info and ideas of how to talk to their kids about Akila.

Another thing on my to-do list for the week. When I tried to talk to Akila about the incident, she responded with her usual response to every discussion about poor behavior. "Why are you trying to make me mad Mom!!??" We then go round and round and get nowhere. It is fun. The ironic thing, is that she came home from school yesterday and had been taking out some of her french braids on the bus (which I brought her to the hair salon to get a little over a week ago, they had at least 2 weeks left in them-sigh). She had puffs of hair above each ear which she had been twisting and had put barrettes on. She looked incredibly goofy. Kind of like an ugly head. I got to spend my entire evening redoing her hair tonight.