It’s a life choice that sneaks up on you, a strand at a time. Maybe it starts as a novelty – your first gray hair! Probably, you comb it back and forget about it. Probably, that works for years. You’re the only one who notices it, after all. 

Until you’re not. While my kiddo was little & I was toddler-mom distracted, my sprinkly grays kicked up their game and evolved into a full-fledged highlight. Being a brunette with unrealized blond ambition, I enjoyed my new look – it was like a little silver flower was blooming at the part line, surrounded by dark brown. Plus did I mention I had a toddler so I had other stuff to think about? Unless something was an active problem with my appearance those days, on the level of “dress inside out” or “open wound”, we were rolling with it. 

My hair started to draw warm commentary from other women. The women in my office admired and affirmed my natural frost. One of my skating friends told me I helped inspire her to step away from hair dye, leading to the gorgeous silver-streaked brown mane that she sports today. Even a hipster stopped me in the park one day to praise my look. It was kind of like the best of all worlds for a few years there. By literally not lifting a finger, I felt like I taking a daily visual stand for anti-ageism and feminism. And, not unimportantly, I liked the way it looked. 

The pro-gray sisters and me were so high on my hair, we didn’t listen to what the haters said. We genuinely didn’t care when my boss’s boss, not having seen me for a long time, greeted me at a meeting with, “Wow, you’ve really grayed up.” I told him my wisdom strands had come in.

But I did care, a few years and a few shades of gray later, when one of my Scouts made a disparaging remark about “your gray hair”. I don’t know why the words of this child bothered me when the words of the boss hadn’t, but there we were. About the same time, a tween girl saw me skating with my daughter, and enthusiastically asked, “Is that your granddaughter?” 

I couldn’t stop laughing. Or more accurately, I could but I didn’t want to. Because if I stopped laughing I’d have to admit how shocking that felt. I was 38, with a long-gone highlight that had grown into a canopy of gray while I wasn’t paying attention. And when I looked at the photos someone took that day on the Scouting trip, seeing the veil of silver that crested over the rest of my head caught me by surprise. Yes, the kids were thoughtless, and unlike grown women, they didn’t appreciate the beauty or the diversity of gray. Which I had more of than I’d realized. More than I wanted. 

This is where my hair got hard. Under the silver-topped mop my brain was in a values debate. I wanted to stay committed to my one-woman stance on embracing the beauty of age. But I wasn’t standing as tall while doing it anymore, because I no longer felt good about the way it looked on me. It was just more gray hair than I was ready to embrace at not-yet-40, too much of a silver frame for my minimally-makeup’d face. But, but, embracing nature! Low-maintenance! Celebrating women’s bodies exactly as they come! My feminist, back to nature self whispered. You’re not happy with it, my pragmatic ass-kicking self whispered back. For a few months, those two duked it out inside my silver-veiled head. And then, the pandemic hit, and I lost my job. 

Ask anyone who has ever been unemployed: a lot of things get harder. Paying bills and keeping your self-esteem from crumbling, to name a few. But a handful of things got easier, and one of them was the hair decision. Call me what you will, this mama has always been a deeply practical soul. Tales of employment age discrimination were all over the Facebook unemployment support groups – real horror stories, like a recruiter hanging up on a woman who revealed her high school graduation year. I hate, hate, hate that kind of nasty short-sighted discrimination. But – I also bring in the bulk of the income in our family. Jobs were scarce, and I was terrified. I had to get a job to keep us going. My economic fears joined forces with my vanity, and a month or so into the job hunt, back to full-on brunette I went.

Do I feel shitty about allowing my economic fears to be the deciding factor in the hair-color war? Yeah. But at the time, I thought it was the best choice I had. A visit to the hair aisle at Any Drugstore U.S.A. confirms, I am far from alone in making that choice. 

I wonder how many decisions to dye are based on a pure ‘want to’ and how many are based on ‘should’. And how many decisions, like mine, are a Frankenstein-esque mix of the two. 

I don’t know exactly where my own desire to be less gray ends and where society’s pressure/rewards for hair-not-colored-gray begin. I do know that sometimes, you need to be surprised by someone else’s perspective to hit upon the next right decision for you. Because a few days ago my wildly creative friend Ashley, squinting up at my face in the late-summer sun, declared that she missed my gray. I told her it was too much. She replied, “Yeah, but have you thought about leaving a streak?”

Until that moment, no. But as soon as she’d said it, it seemed so obvious. I’d been too gray, I was feeling too brown – if I left part of my hair to do its natural thing, maybe that would be my Goldilocks balance of just right. That night, I started working on my streak. 

Will this work out? Who knows! But for now, in the spirit of my favorite podcast the Guilty Feminist I can proudly say – I’m a feminist, but I cover my grays. Most of ‘em, anyway.