At the young age of nine, Utah schoolgirl Isabella Pieri went through what no little girl should have to – she lost her mom. Isabella’s mom suffered from a rare disease that ended up taking her life after years of fighting, leaving her husband Philip and daughter Isabella on their own.
Dealing with the loss of his wife, Philip now faced another challenge: raising a young girl all by himself. Single parenthood is something that millions of people do every day, and it can be especially challenging to raise a child of the opposite gender. For Philip, he found many of the small, everyday tasks the most difficult, like choosing something for Isabella to wear, or styling her hair every morning.
With long, thick locks that were often knotted and tangled after a night’s sleep, Isabella’s hair was something he just didn’t know how to handle, so he cut it all off. “He gave me a crew cut,” she told NBC News.
Two years later, and more able to take care of her morning routine before school, Isabella’s hair had grown back. She had taken to wearing it in a simple ponytail, but still missed the touch of a mother’s hands who could style her hair a different way every now and then.
One day she spotted her school bus driver, Tracy Dean, fixing a classmate’s braids. She approached Tracy and asked if she could put braids in her hair. “I [could] tell she was struggling with her hair,” said Dean.
Dean is a mother of four children and has worked as a bus driver for the Alpine School District for 10 years. With a daughter the same age as Isabella, she found no problem taking up the task of styling the young girl’s hair, and it soon became a routine for the two of them. “We usually do two French braids first and once in a while she just wants one braid. I also taught her how to brush her hair.”
Dean loves her job and saw it as her duty to take care of each and every one of the kids on the schoolbus. But there was yet another reason she took up her role in Isabella’s life with such love and care.
Seven years earlier, Dean herself went through an ordeal with her health, undergoing treatment for a breast cancer. As she was battling the disease, she constantly thought about what it would mean to leave her husband and four children behind: “Who is going to take care of my little ones?” Seeing the same thing happening to a girl the same age as her daughter, she took her under her wing.
When dad Philip heard about the amazing act of kindness from Dean, he was touched: “She didn’t have to step up. When she stepped up, I was amazed.” Dean said the hair styling was no big deal, and has simply become a part of her morning.
Isabella has now found that mother figure she had been missing for two years, and looks forward to her daily hairstyle before school. “It makes me excited for the next day, to see what she does,” said Isabella.
Dean understood dad Philip’s situation easily: “You know, that’s what moms do. They do their kids’ hair.”
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