For as long as I can remember, I\u2019ve had dark hair. A full head of it when I came wriggling out of my mama on a rainy Thursday morning in 1972. The twiggy brown baby bangs I cut myself when I was six. For a time, in high school in the 80s, it skewed a little burgundy but that was an Annie Lennox-inspired blip that didn\u2019t last.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout my 50 years on this planet, I\u2019ve been accompanied by a crown of coarse, cocoa-brown locks. They were handed down from my mother and her mother and her mother before that. But I\u2019m certain their roots stretch back even further\u2026 to a quaint shtetl in Western Ukraine, where they weaved across borders and cultures and oceans and gene pools to land atop my head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But life, as they say, is change. And when that change manifested in the form of tiny silver springs bouncing out from between my ancestral brown strands, I fought it valiantly. Coloring and coaxing it back to the chocolate that felt like my calling card, like a central pillar of my physical persona. Like me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something happens at midlife, though. The inclination to fight what in our hearts we know to be inevitable, wanes. And after years of dying and hiding my gray hair, clinging tightly to the person I thought myself to be, I find lately that I don\u2019t have the fight in me anymore. Instead, I find myself longing for authenticity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because it\u2019s not just hair. It\u2019s my own ability to tell the truth about myself. It\u2019s my son \u2013 my little surprise boy who came along when I was 46 and after a lifetime of being told by well-meaning doctors that I\u2019d never bear biological children \u2013 loving me as I really am: his silver-haired mama. And in doing so, knowing that a woman aging, showing her true colors, being herself at last, is a beautiful, powerful, sparkling thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m now on a journey to grow out my grays. It\u2019s a process that began recently with lightening the rest of my hair so that the emerging roots blend better and make the visual transition a bit more bearable. I know there will be grief along the way \u2013 for the me that is no longer \u2013 but the me I haven\u2019t met yet is waiting, and I can\u2019t wait to see what she looks like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Watching myself emerge in this way is tender, humbling, curious, and nothing short of a revelation. How often in life do we get to meet ourselves all over again?<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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