Gray Matters

In case you missed it, I recently made a huge announcement on social media. After 16 years of dying my hair to cover the pesky grays that have become increasingly resilient over the years, I’ve finally decided to ditch the dye and embrace my “new” natural hair color.

6.5 weeks since I last had my roots covered

Nope! It’s not a quarantine decision. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years now each time I put down a chunk of money to dye my roots and a week or two later those gray strands reappear. It’s a battle that I’m clearly not winning. I should know better than to associate graying with aging. I’ve had gray hair since I was 27, and my dad grayed early too. He was thirty-three when I was born, and although he was a towhead kid, I have only ever known him with salt-and-pepper hair.

Unlike myself, my dad loved his gray hair. He loved that his thick mop of salt-and-pepper hair could get him senior specials long before he was eligible. When my brother and I were kids, my dad would ask us to pull out the dark hairs on his head.  Get them all, he’d say driving down the highway with me sitting seatbelt-less behind him, taking great care to keep my feet on either side of the gaping hole in the floor of his orange Mercury Bobcat, plucking dark hairs from his head.

What can I say?  It was the 80s and my dad coveted his grays even if it was only for a senior discount at a Big Boy’s restaurant.

Me and my dad circa 1977

For me, going gray meant something else entirely. It meant lost youth, feeling like I was on the verge of becoming invisible. My almost-black hair had defined me my whole life. It made me special and seen. What would happen when I lost what made me special? Who would I be then?

Why am I telling you this?

Well, again, if you’ve seen any of my recent social media posts, you might have read that I’m working on a new book. It’s a stand-alone adult fiction novel about women and how we sometimes don’t recognize ourselves as we move through the different stages of aging. It’s about changing roles and reshaped identities.  I am in the early stages of writing the book, but as I’ve been developing the story, I realize how much women, in particular, feel pressure to look and act a certain way as they get older.

Don’t let your hair go grey when you’re thirty. You’ll look old and that’s bad.

Older than 40? Uh-oh, you better not let your hair go past your shoulders. 

Approaching your sixtieth birthday? Well, now it’s okay to be gray, BUT, please, for the love of Buddha, don’t wear a two-piece swimsuit.

The women in my new book are fierce, but they’ve lost their autonomy because they spent too many years defined by their marriages, motherhood, and societal expectations. My fiction books are just that – fiction – but there’s always a nugget of truth in fiction, and I always find a little of myself in my characters.

Like my characters, I am at a pivotal point in my life. I have an adult child. I have a teenager. I am 43 years old (although I often think I’m still 42 because I have a weird thing about odd numbers), and have years stretched out before me where the possibilities for my life are endless. Do I really want to worry about my hair when there’s so much more to life? My husband doesn’t worry about his gray hair, which, unfairly, just started showing up and he’s six years older than me. So why should I worry about mine?

If you’re reading this and struggling with making a choice that goes against societal norms, why not consider turning your back on expectations and see where the path leads you? Just a suggestion.

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