hair today

Yesterday I did something I thought I’d never do. Something I probably wouldn’t have done if I still lived on the east coast. Something that doesn’t fit my personal philosophy, even.

It was almost an accident. It’s not like I woke up yesterday morning thinking, “Today I’m going to do it, I am.” It’s more like I woke up thinking, “Oh crap, I’m going to be on TV on Tuesday and my hair is long overdue for a cut” and went and made a last minute appointment.

What? Oh, the television thing? Complicated, but in essence: I know someone who knows someone who works for a local news station. They’ve gathered together a number of parents of special needs kids who have faced discrimination by the school district or rather by petty bureaucrats therein. We’re meeting Tuesday with cameras present to tell our woes. I don’t know when it’s going to air, but I’ll try to let you know.

So yesterday I thought, “I’m going to look terrible on TV” and went off to make an appointment for a cut. I’ve been seeing this hair stylist since November. I like what she does. She just gave Dan a new cut a few weeks ago that looks better than any I’ve ever seen on him. I trust her eye. So I let her cut it a bit shorter and a bit more uneven and I’m happy with the result.

She said, as she always says, “Why not color it? Hide the gray? It dulls your hair.” I said, as I always say “I don’t know if that’s really me.” But I felt, as I always feel, this pull toward doing it.

It doesn’t fit my self-image, someone who dyes her hair. I’m more of the be true to your body type. Embrace getting older because mimicking youth just looks tacky and false.

But. I live in Los Angeles. Everyone I know, literally every single woman I know, even the ones who don’t wear bras, who walk around barefoot, who practice all kinds of interesting alternative religions, even all of those women don’t let their hair go gray. It’s just Not Done. In general, I’m fine with being different, dressing differently and living differently and having different life goals. It’s hard sometimes, and sometimes I feel like an outsider here. But if you live in a world where no woman in her forties or even fifties has even a single gray strand in her honey colored tresses or her dark locks, you start to see things through their eyes. Gray becomes strange. And even if you yourself look in the mirror and think, “What the hell, it looks fine to me,” you know other people don’t see it the same way. You hear the moms of your child’s friends complaining about how they can’t wait till they’re no longer pregnant so they can go get this awful gray out. You hear fellow moms commiserate with them, yeah, pregnancy is awful, god, that gray, they shudder to contemplate. And you stand there with your gray threads lacing through your dark hair and think, “How do they see me?” And you can’t help it, you let it color (pun intended) the way you think of yourself, through their eyes reflected. D for dowdy.

If I lived in a different culture, in Boston, say, where my two-years-younger cousin got married with the strands of gray plentiful in her long dark hair, if I lived in a place where it was accepted and understood and even appreciated, I’d act differently. I’m not proud of this, not exactly. I’d rather be strong and independent and an iconoclast. But when people judge on appearances – and trust me, they do – it’s an instant judgment and not a favorable one. If I want to appear strong and self-confident, as I increasingly have become; if I want to seem – ironic though it may be – like the person I am – I need to at least try this on for size. To erase the gray. To see how that feels, see how people respond, see how I’m newly reflected in their eyes.

So I said, “What the hell. Let’s try it.” And today I have dark hair with no gray. It looks strange. I keep expecting the gray. At first, in fact, I was sure she’d made the color too dark. Too strong a dye. It can’t be my real color, can it? But she showed me a spot where she hadn’t worked in the dye, where it was still my real hair color at the root, an area that hadn’t had gray to begin with. And sure enough, it matched perfectly with the rest. It’s just that I’d gotten enough gray that it lightened the overall sense of the hair color and now that’s gone. My eyes weren’t used to it yet. This morning, though, I looked in the mirror and thought, “Yes, that’s right. That’s how it used to be. That’s me five years ago.” And it was a comforting feeling. As you grow older, particularly past forty when you can start to see the changes in your skin, your face, your hair, it starts to feel odd, like you’re stepping into a new body. To return in this one way to the person you recognize of old, that’s a unexpected good feeling. Not a pretense of youth, not that. I’m not trying to erase the still-faint lines forming between my eyebrows. Not about to dress like a twenty five year old. Not about to pretend the years don’t matter. They do. I feel a whole hell of a lot savvier and more experienced and, yes, more mature, these days. Don’t you dare try and take that away from me. But I changing my hair color isn’t that. Rather, it’s a new definition of who I am right now. And yes, it makes me feel more self-confident in this city, in the life I live here, and that’s good, not bad. It turns out, of course, the new/old color isn’t about other people as much as it is about me. I want to be myself more fully, more assuredly, and this, in an odd and backward way, is part of that. At least here and now it is.

Posted by Tamar at June 27, 2004 11:42 AM