I like my gray hairs. I like them a lot. I wish I had more than just the two lonely gray hairs on the top of my head.

So, in that, I guess I’m kind of strange. I don’t care whether others see my grays or what they think about them.

In fact, I was a little hurt when my friend saw one in the back of my head a few years ago and just plucked it out, assuming that like herself, I didn’t want gray hairs in my head. I didn’t even have the chance to tell her, “No, just leave it.” That was my gray hair!

Age 33 (I wrote this five years ago) is fast approaching and I only have two silver-gray hairs to show for my years. I had always imagined that I would gray fairly young. I’m thinking now that I may take after my mother who, in her sixties, still has more brown hair than silver beauties.

Gray hair doesn’t bother me. I don’t feel moved to pluck these babies out. Well…maybe I’m tempted when their distinctively wirey texture causes them to proclaim themselves as curly, shiny silver antennae atop my dark brown head. But I leave them be. I earned them after all, right?

I don’t want to pluck them; I don’t want to cover them. I want more.

My grays remind me that my life, while relatively short yet, has been well-spent as a mother and wife. I can look at them without disdain; I welcome the appearance of more, enjoying the realization that my reproductive years have been…well, productive.

It reminds me that my desire from childhood to be the “mother of many” has been granted, and that my absence of a career drive right now is not a bad thing at all.

I’ll take all the gray hairs I’m fortunate enough to get and rest in the contentment that gray is definitely okay with me.

© Alexa Lopez 2007

(originally written September, 2002; revised September 2007)