MY GRAY HAIR
A Middle-Aged Woman With
Gray Hair & Readers
I can’t talk about my hair without first talking about my mom’s side of the family. That’s them in the picture below. This picture is ~30 years old, but you can see that there is a family trait here that, with a few exceptions, runs strong. Dark hair. Not just dark hair. Dark, thick hair. The kind of hair that you get thinned out when you get a haircut and it still looks like too much. The kind of hair where your stylist calls you to reschedule your haircut because the receptionist only scheduled 30 minutes and there is NO WAY she could get it done in 30 minutes. “She didn’t know who you were” she explained.
True story.
Happened two weeks ago.
And we are born with this hair. A family of babies born with full heads of thick, dark hair. Hair that runs down their backs, shoulders, and ears. I remember the first time my mother-in-law saw our oldest. She pulled up the tiny knit cap we had on his head and just looked over at my husband and me with a huge smile and a look that said “wow!”. Both my mother-in-law and our oldest were adorable.
Another trait of this hair? Premature gray. You can see the gray on a few of my uncles in this picture (my beautiful mother - front row, third from the left - was coloring her hair at this time so you can’t see it on her – but it’s there). So when my hairstylist found a gray hair on my head at age 16, I wasn’t surprised. I was surprised to find a gray hair on my oldest child’s head at age 8. It is just the start, darlin’!
This hair comes from that bad a#$ in the front row with the striking, white hair. That gorgeous woman is my Grandma Rosie.
The best thing about my Grandma Rosie was that she was warm and welcoming. She had this great laugh and a huge smile that put everyone at ease. And if you were in her home, you were family. Grab a drink, play euchre, and laugh and chat until the police show up to quiet you down. Another true story. And when the police asked her how old she was, she lied because you don’t ask a lady her age! And she was a lady!
In her youth, she had thick, dark hair and she was, by all accounts, quite a babe. I never knew my Grandma Rosie to have anything but gray hair. I’ve seen pictures of her in her 40’s and 50’s where she is mostly gray. So, I guess, in hindsight, I’m lucky. My gray hair didn’t really start to roll in until I was in my mid-to-late 30’s. However, by then, I was starting to look a little older than I was. At the time, our children were 5 and 8 and I was becoming self-conscious around the other moms at my kids’ school. I wanted to look like their mom, not their grandma. So I started coloring my hair. And continued to do so for about 11 years.
About thee years months ago, I started kicking around the idea of letting my hair color grow out, but didn’t pull the trigger for several reasons:
At the time I worked with a lot of younger people (which, obviously, happens when you grow older). I didn’t want to be the old lady on the team.
My hairstylist told me that if I let it grow out it would add 10 years to my look. I already looked my age, so that’s intimidating.
Our kids were still young, so there was a risk of being mistaken for their grandma. It happened to my mom once when my brother was about one year old (my mom was about 37 at the time). That was before she started to color her hair. Also, I was mistaken for his mother. I was 14. Not cool!
The idea that my hair would be half gray and half colored for a long time……….Ugh! It’s like growing out bangs, but worse.
What if my gray was that yellowish, brassy color? What if, for some reason, I didn’t get that beautiful gray like my mom and Grandma?
So many unknowns.
Then I had this epiphany.
I had been sick for several days before I realized I had a fever and needed to go to the doctor. Diagnosis? Sinus infection and bronchitis. I spent the next several days in bed. At the peak of being sick, I was washing my hands in the bathroom. I looked in the mirror and thought “man, I need to do my roots”. I’m standing there with a fever, incredibly pale, and feeling the worst I had felt in ages and I was concerned with coloring my hair? What is wrong with me?!
At that very moment, I decided I was done. No more hair color. After all, what are the odds it would actually age me 10 years?
When I felt better and got back to my normal life I started telling folks I stopped coloring my hair/they noticed on their own. People’s reactions were varied:
“That’s going to look so good on you!”
“Oh. Okay. I’m sure it will look great.”
“I give it a month. No way you let it grow out.”
“Your kids are still pretty young, right?” I think they meant that I’d look older than the mom of a tween and a teen. I didn’t bother clarifying because I was scared of the answer.
Three people said something along the lines of “are you sure you want to do that? You know how older women fare in the workplace.” Wow. Okay. Hadn’t thought of that.
But I did it. I gave myself back time and money and let it go. Mostly, I gave myself permission to age and, you guys, it’s kind of freeing. I didn’t realize how much thought went into coloring my hair. At the core of it, I was trying to cover up how old I was. And with that cover-up came another voice in the back of my head (one of many) that kept reminding me to cover up my gray. Because my hair is so dark and grows quickly, my roots would start showing within two weeks of coloring. Being a mom who also worked 50 to 60 hours a week, I was always running. That meant I only had time to color my hair about every six weeks. That’s four weeks of worrying that people would notice my roots. I didn’t realize what a weight that was until I stopped.
So I asked earlier “What are the odds it will actually age me 10 years?”. Turns out, the odds were pretty good (although my husband does not agree). My stylist had a better view of just how much gray there was, so she was right. But here’s the thing; I don’t care.
I’m proud to be middle-aged and I’m proud of this hair. No embarrassment. No shame. As I stated in an earlier post, there is wisdom, grace, and confidence in this hair. I’m grateful that I look in the mirror and see my mom, my sister, and brother, my uncles, my cousins, and my children. I see my Grandma Rosie.
I can’t imagine it any other way.
Until next time.
#grayhairblogging