I'm one of those women who prides herself on choosing breast over bottle, flip-flops over stiletto and Boca over beef.
I don’t wear polyester or mascara.
Perhaps most significantly, I never did, nor was I ever going to, dye my hair.
Rather, I was going be like my 70-year-old friend, Carol. A beautiful, accomplished and confident professor at a local liberal-college, she wears a proud, gray braid down her back as a badge of defiance against a phony world.
Ah, but every 100-percent-cotton devotee has her day of reckoning. Mine came four years ago, in the fall of 2006, when I went to a snappy, new hairdresser for a little trim in preparation for my niece's wedding.
"See any gray back there?" I asked.
I already knew about the tiniest strands of gray framing my face.
As for the rest of my head, I was prepared for her to say something back-handedly affirming, like "Wow. For as old as you are, it's amazing how little your hair has grayed."
Instead: "I'd say you've got about 50 percent coverage back here."
I grabbed the hand mirror, which lay bare the truth and a mass of glop that was the color of Ohio in February.
My values, my bragging rights and all that talk about Oil of Olay being a racket disintegrated like Obama's presidency. I must have whimpered involuntarily.
"You know we could very easily fix this," she said.
I was too stunned to take in too much of what she said after that, so much prattle about low lights and high lights and permanent vs. semi-permanent. I got out of there as fast as I could, hurrying to gather in the opinions of my village:
• "You'll feel better about yourself if you do,” said the vainest of my blood sisters, whose hair is bottle black.
• "You might feel better about yourself if you don't," said my youngest sister, who makes her own alfalfa sprouts and yogurt.
• "You will be a disgrace to your Southern upbringing if you don't," said my middle sister, who emerged from the womb with a shock of gray in front.
• But the most dramatic, and the most effective, comment came from my then 18-year-old son. "Mom! You have always been your own person! You don't have to be one of 'those women'! You can be who you want to be, just by being you! I like you the way you are! Just be yourself!"
For awhile, my son won. For two more years, in fact, I lived with the gray that was, on the one hand, a public embracing of aging, and on the other hand, beginning to make my particular face look really bad. Some people look really beautiful as they age, their thick black hair framing their face like the contrast button on PhotoShop. My thin, wispy hair, on the other hand, looked like the dirty broom you use in the garage, a crisscross of brown leaves and grit from the car's oil pan.
Much as I was OK with telling people my age, I realized I was not OK with looking like a dead person. I didn't feel old when I looked in the mirror. I felt ugly.
Somewhere along the way, then, I began to mix up this paradigm I’d held so tight.
I came to believe that the personal beauty I'd always refused to be slave to, is valuable, that the search for it doesn’t stop as we age, that wanting to look beautiful is not denying the natural process or the reality of aging.
And so I did it. One sunny day during the summer of 2008, my new hairdresser, who is really a hairdresser/therapist, who totally gets me, painted semi-permanent ash all over my head and blonde highlights on top.
I couldn't believe how pretty I looked when she was done, not just my hair, but my face, my whole being.
And now? Now, two years after that first dye job, I can’t imagine not dyeing my hair. I may one day stray from my hairdresser and do my own henna that my alfalfa sprouts friends keep telling me about. For now, I have come to appreciate the smell of ammonia the morning after.
