The Old Gray Mule

The other night, as I performed the Dreaded Bedtime Ritual in the attempt to persuade the offspring to lie down and actually sleep, we hit a little snag. In between the part when she puts her pajamas on backward, and the final “no more goofiness!” threat, we added an extra element; an explanation of why we don’t go to sleep with gum in our mouths.

Everyone addresses this eventually, and I’m sure for most it’s a sentence or two at the longest, and then on with the routine. For my kid, a simple explanation rarely sticks. A back-story is required to drive the point home, and while I will cop to fabricating them from time to time when I don’t have a good one at hand, I had a bona fide personal anecdote waiting for just such an occasion.

As a little girl, my hair was exactly like my daughter’s is now, other than the length; she likes hers in an old-fashioned bob with bangs, and I wore mine like a damn dirty hippie, long and disobedient. Texture-wise, though, she’s a total throwback; for both of us, no amount of brushing or conditioner could make up for the follicular insurgency factor. Despite the care with which I brush out every snaggle each morning, by the time I arrive to pick her up in the afternoon, that hair has declared anarchy and somehow converted to Rastafarianism at the same time. I well recall my mother cursing like the merchant marine under her breath as she yanked and jerked a brush through my gorgon-caliber dreads each night before bath time; I have, regrettably, passed on the rebel hair gene. Sorry, kid.

I managed to hang onto that unruly pelt until 4th grade, until the night I broke the rule and didn’t throw out the gum I’d been masticating all evening, which was the reason that the next day, I was on my way to the salon for my first-ever haircut. Unplanned, but not negotiable, unless I wanted to spend the next year growing out the bald spot that corresponded to the place I’d found the contraband wad of grape Bubblicious that morning.

In every life, there are defining moments. Some are smaller than others. Some aren’t even recognized until much later. I can recall the exact words of the woman who first took scissors to my mutinous mane, and they clearly delineate the beginning of the end of those carefree days with no thought whatsoever about my hair.

“Oh my God, this little girl has gray hair!”

It did not matter that my new cut was a jaunty Wedge, the very height of elementary chic in 1977. It mattered a little that I went from looking like the feral child of Ted Nugent to looking like Dorothy Hamill, and in the process lost about a quarter of my total mass and weight. It mattered mightily that I was suddenly and for the first time aware of my own mortality, if only peripherally. Children don’t have gray hair. Old people have gray hair, and then they die. Even my scalp liked to break rules, it seemed.

In all candor, at the time I was just mostly annoyed. Every stylist in the large salon crowded around my chair to see my abnormality for themselves, up close. Once I left the scene of my mortification, life went on, and I swear I was able to run faster without all that fur on my head. No one else knew I was a senior citizen masquerading as a 4th grader, so I readily forgot, too. But from that day onward, I saw the specter of my own eventual decline and demise, from afar, in the rearview mirror.

Not that I’m obsessed with death; quite the contrary. I’ve never been afraid of it, truly, unless it involves a tractor-trailer or a pitchfork-wielding maniac with a hard-on. But knowing that the clock of your youth is ticking is a strange sort of awareness, and it helped make me an even weirder kid.

I was probably doomed from the get-go. My father was totally white-headed by the time I was a toddler; I don’t recall him ever having a color on his head, despite all the Grecian Formula he was using (now I realize this stuff is like self-tanner for the hair; I am definitely my father’s child). I was apparently not sharp enough to grasp that my mom colored her hair regularly; I just thought she had dark brown hair that grew fast enough to need a cut once every three weeks. And her sister, my Aunt Myrtle, had lost all her color by the time she was 25, according to family legend (although I will totally take that genetic bequest, if it’s part of a package deal; Myrtle is 100 years old and still drinks Guinness, loves candy and watches sports nonstop).

By the time I was in my early twenties, my natural chestnut-brown had begun to fade, and for a brief, shining moment, this worked for me; all of the colors within the spectrum of human hair color lived together in peace on my cranium at once. I remember a trip to Worlds of Fun with a boy I was goo-goo over, and him sitting behind me on the Viking’s Voyager and telling me how beautiful my hair was; “It’s every color in the world!”

This lasted, like, a year. Tops.

Then, it was a matter of coming to terms with the idea of coloring it every 4-6 weeks for the rest of my life. No problem. Except it costs how much? Okay, I’ll learn to do it myself. And don’t forget not to dye it green by accident, the day before being a bridesmaid! Or get busy and go a couple weeks too long between dye jobs, unless I feel like rocking a skunk ‘do. And forget about having long hair anymore; soaking it in chemicals that regularly is not exactly conducive to glorious long locks, I do not care what Sarah Jessica Parker says to the contrary. And God help you if you want to flat-iron or curl it.

Face it, sad sack; you got one option. Short and wavy. Shut up and deal.

I love it when I tell people how gray I am naturally; it serves to find out lots of interesting information about them that I may or may not have cared to know.

Like, how out of touch with reality are they? JD’s father once told me he likes “the natural look, with that streak of gray in front.” This from the man who told JD “You’re such a talented singer; why don’t you just get a record contract?”

Oh, how I wish it were that simple, like growing a silver racing stripe framing my face, a la Stacy London. No, no, no. It’s like this:

Only with gray Play-Doh. And slightly less facial hair.

Listen, if I were lucky enough to have been born with olive skin and brown eyes, I might be okay with letting go and letting it do its thing. Or if it grew in all luminous and silver. But alas; as y'all should know by now, I am completely devoid of natural coloring of any kind. If the hair were white, too, I'm afraid I might look like the Headless Horseman. I'm already scary enough to children, aren't I?

So let the old girl have her last few years of vanity, please? I'll look like Ed Asner soon enough.

I'm interested to know what my readers plan on doing with the impending gray? Are you ballsy enough to go for the full monty?