Growing Edges
alexa lopezArchive for aging
Gray Hair? Bring It On! (Part II)
So, I’m getting more grays little by little, though not at all quickly enough for me. I feel kind of bad getting so excited about newly discovered grays because a couple of my kids, when within earshot of one of my “Look at this new one I just found!” proclamations, shout, “No!!!!” in protest. The societal “gray equals old” stigma brings on that fear kids have about their parents getting old and dying.
My goodness, I’m not even forty yet! I know that’s ancient to anyone younger than 18. To me it means that my hair has character…dimension…dare I say beauty?
One of my customers last year was telling me what we could do to cover up the gray while giving dimension to the rest of my hair. I finally said, “Um, what if I don’t want to cover it?” He had no answer for that one.
Now I have to say that when our sanguine-spirited, fourth-born child had a miserable case of the chicken pox three years ago at the age of six,— this boy rarely got sick — I had him in my lap to try to get his mind off the itchiness. The sadness in his eyes was heartbreaking. I asked him what else was wrong, and his answer surprised me: “I don’t want you to get old.”
And I thought he was going to tell me how unbearable was the itching on his body!
My heart was so moved by his sadness that I asked him, ”Would it help you if I pulled out my gray hairs?”
“Yeah,” he answered without hesitancy.
I didn’t regret doing what I could to bring temporary comfort to my sick son. It’s only hair, and it grows back. I could have had the “too bad, so sad, they’re mine” attitude about it. Frankly, I didn’t consider that an option.
This is meaningful to me since I cannot create the silver-gray I’m in such a hurry to have. Hair salons these days can do anything — make black hair blonde and anything in-between — but emulating the uniqueness of age-related silver or gray is (I am told by a local stylist) impossible, otherwise I may have found a way by now to pay big for that transformation.
I’ve got to earn those grays, whether by aging or by any of those variables that contribute to the graying. Whatever path I take, if I’m on a path of integrity and honor, I can consider those grays a reward.
© Alexa Lopez 2008
Gray Hair? Bring It On! (Part I)
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)
