Meg’s Questions

By teresita On June 17, 2009 · 5 Comments

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Meghan is nine years old, and for the first time in her life, during her family’s stay in Mexico, lives in a house with a TV. She’s equally entranced by “Esponja Bob Pantalones Cuadros”, telenovelas, and commercials for hemorrhoid ointment: she’ll sit with a forgotten lump of half-chewed cereal in her hanging-open mouth, staring at just about anything.

Right now she’s watching a commercial for skin-whitening cream.

Without turning away from the TV, she asks me, “Why do some people in Mexico want their skin to be whiter?”

I tell her, “Well, partly because some people here like white skin because it’s unusual, just like in the U.S. we think curly hair or green eyes are really pretty because most people don’t have them… And unfortunately some people think having white skin means you’re better than people who have dark skin.”

“Really?” she says. “I thought people stopped believing that a long time ago.”

And I sigh and tell her, “Nope. It’s very sad, but lots of people still believe that.”

And then Esponja Bob is back and the conversation is over.

***

A couple lifetimes ago, back in Santa Cruz, when I was Meghan’s nanny and she was about three, we were talking about dogs. We’d read something about “wild dogs” and she wanted to know if her dog was a wild dog.

I explained that her dog wasn’t a wild dog; that wild dogs and wild animals don’t live in houses with people, and they don’t need people to feed them because they find their own food.

She thought about that for a while.

Then she asked me, “Are there any wild people?”

I never did come up with a good answer to that one, for Meg or for myself. I still think about it now and then. That whatever a wild person is, I think that’s what I want to be when I grow up.

5 responses to Meg’s Questions

andreablythe said on May 6, 2010

I love the way you paint scenes. And Med seems like an amazing kid.

There are so many ridiculous ways that people perceive body. It all keeps getting redefined according to popular notions. It’s just so unfortunate that this “whitening” is not one of those that long went out of style.
Julie Schwietert Collazo said on June 28, 2009

I’m so glad I scrolled back through weeks of blogs to catch up.
You know, Francisco and I cracked up, then raged for a bit, after seeing “nose thinners” or some such contraption at the pharmacy around the corner from where we lived in DF. It’s a set of clips that can be put inside the nose to make it less broad at the base. We joked that we’d start a collection of these “medical” items that can make one more cosmetically desirable, but somehow we couldn’t bring ourselves to buy the nose clips.
sociosound said on June 17, 2009

aww this is an awesome post. Keep sharing! Meghan sounds like a lovely kidlet
Carlo Alcos said on June 17, 2009

Pantalones, what a cool word. Lovely post Teresa! We can learn a lot from the innocence of little kids, can’t we? We get blind to things because of our jadedness and cynicism. Sometimes it just takes an innocent comment to make us rethink what we think we know, and to realize we don’t know at all.
Hal Amen said on June 17, 2009

Yay! I love your blogs, Teresa.

I also hope I get to see Esponja Bob Pantalones Cuadros soon.