I found my first gray hair when I was 18. My mom was taking me to a shopping mall out of town and, at the time, my hair was long enough to sit on if I leaned my head back a little. I remember she had just parked, and I was reaching to open my car door, when suddenly I noticed a solitary hair in the sea of brown and auburn waves, glistening silver in the sunlight coming through the Ford Taurus window. I don’t know why that moment is so memorable–I suppose it was the first sign of aging that I ever really experienced. At that point, I had never dyed my hair (well, except for a mostly failed attempt to dye a small section of it purple with Kool-Aid at my friend Virginia’s birthday party in 8th grade). I figured this one white hair was a fluke–that it wasn’t really a gray hair, it was just…lacking pigment. So, I plucked it out and went on with my day.
A few years later, when I was in college, and studying in Spain for a summer, I was in the bathroom at the university where I was taking classes and, while washing my hands, I glanced in the mirror and saw, again, shining in a shaft of sunlight coming in through a window, a white hair. I dried my hands off and looked a little closer, and found that there were actually a few of them this time. I plucked them out, and went to my next class with a nagging little worry that maybe I was going to end up completely gray before my 30th birthday.
After I finished college, though, as the grays kept showing up (though not at a rate that would put me on par with Carol Channing’s white coif any time soon), I started thinking about it, and I didn’t really want to start dyeing my hair. I’ve never been big into makeup or style, or even regular haircuts, necessarily, and I hated the idea of having to keep up with dyeing it. So I didn’t. I even quit plucking the grays I found, because I decided I’d rather have gray hair than no hair, eventually. And then, not long after I turned 30, I landed the role of Lucy Van Pelt in a community theatre production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown!” The costume people wanted my hair to be darker to be closer to cartoon Lucy’s shade, and convinced me that a semi-permanent dye was no big deal. So, one day, not long before the show opened, I had someone (I think it was my sister) help me dye it…and I fell a little bit in love with the gray-less, darker look. So, after the show ended, and the semi-permanent dye started to fade, I got a boxed permanent dye, and that began my 5-ish years of occasional hair-dyeing. I was never very good at keeping up with it, but every couple/few months I would notice that there were some visible grays near my roots and would take a little time on a weekend to cover them up. I didn’t really like doing it, but I did like not seeing the grays, so I just kept at it.
The last time I dyed my hair was a week before my wedding to the Bearded One last summer. I don’t know why I quit, exactly–maybe I feel confident now that I don’t have to try to attract a mate with falsely youthful attributes. Maybe I’m more comfortable with it since the Bearded One grew out his luscious face mane and doesn’t worry about the little bits of gray in it. Either way, it’s been a little over a year now and all but the bottom couple inches of my hair has grown out in its natural shade, which now includes many more grays than I had 6 years ago and even a little streak of them up by my right temple. But I don’t really mind it–at least most of the time.
As I move closer to the “middle aged” range, I’m working on letting go of beliefs that have held me back in all facets of life, and am trying to live in a way that is more truly me. A way that, to some extent, eschews many of the societal expectations that we’re led to believe will make us happy: the idea that one must pursue a specific career path and follow it to retirement, the idea that the accumulation of money and possessions defines one’s level of “success”, and, of course, the idea that eternal physical youthfulness should be the goal. I’ve been questioning that whole “one-career-through-retirement” thing for years, and having the right “things” has rarely been my main focus, but the fear of growing (and looking) older is a fear that I’ve known. But, while I may still use some kind of wrinkle creams, or something (because I’ve noticed that my sometimes ridiculous facial expressions are starting to leave their mark), I don’t think I want to dye my hair anymore. I suppose I may go for some fun colors when I get closer to being all gray, but for now I like to think of the grays as tinsel–just little silvery decorations. Lately I’m seeing a lot more people who aren’t dyeing their hair, and I love it. I even saw a mom of an elementary-aged kid with almost completely gray hair (like, real gray hair, not the pastel dyed gray), pulled up in a messy bun, and I thought, “If we end up having kids I want to be that kind of mom.” And I’ve adopted my style icons for the future as:
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/jane-fonda-in-peace-love-and-misunderstanding/Content?oid=6624025
“Grace” (Jane Fonda) in a terrible movie called “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding” (note that she accessorizes with chickens), and:
https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/culture/19775/lily-tomlin-talks-coming-out-and-playing-a-gay-grandma/
“Frankie” (Lily Tomlin) from the Netflix Original Show, “Grace and Frankie” (which also features Jane Fonda as “Grace”, but “Grace and Frankie” Grace doesn’t have nearly as much style as “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding” Grace).
Both of these characters proudly sport their graying hair with…ahem…grace. I know, the actors are probably wearing wigs, but I think it’s gorgeous. And even if all of my hair eventually goes totally white, I’ll get the special shampoo that keeps it from turning yellow or greenish and I’ll rock that…or I won’t get the special shampoo and I’ll just have yellow or greenish hair.
I guess the point of all of this is that, yes, graying hair is a sign of aging, but aging is really just the accumulation of life experience. The lyrics of the Faces song, “Ooh La La” say, “I wish that I knew what I know now…when I was younger…” But if I’d known then what I know now, and avoided some mistakes or wrong turns along the way, I probably wouldn’t be where I am now. And I like where I am now–I love it, even. So I’ll take the life experience, and the gray hairs, and I’ll keep on taking them, because they’re proof that I’m living and growing. For the record, I don’t think I have life all figured out–I absolutely don’t. But at least I realize that I don’t, and the longer I’m alive the more I can learn. And if that means more gray hair, sign me up.
growingmoxie.com 