Gray Matters

I run my fingers through my hair as I stare into the bathroom mirror, and there it is, the gray beneath the dark brown, the truth beneath the lie.  Many people think I look young for 56, but would they say the same thing if they saw the true color of my hair?

This is what my hair looks like when I lift it up. See that gray?

A few weeks ago, I got tired of the lie. I had thoughts of chopping off my two-foot-long hair and going with a pixie cut. Growing out gray is not easy. The infamous skunk stripe lies as much as dyed hair does. Maybe it shouts, “I don’t care about my looks,” or “I’m too cheap to cover my gray,” or “I am sickly,” or “I am old, and it doesn’t matter anymore.” I don’t think it would ever announce, “I’ve taken control of my emotions, and I am not ashamed to be me.”

This is what the world sees.

Ronald and I talked about my hair. We’ve talked about it a lot over the years during complicated, emotionally wrought discussions. How can they not be when each cares so deeply for the wellbeing of the other and yet has needs that also require attention?

Ronald, an artist, has captured me in photos, in oil, in plaster, and in the love letters he sent to me when I had to return to Albany for the first two summers after we met freshman year of college. Most men are visual when it comes to attraction to the opposite sex, but there is an aesthetic that further defines Ronald’s attraction. Flawless skin of certain hues that range from palest white to deepest brown but share a certain luminescence of tone. Large eyes, downturned mouth, and a small chin are other features that speak to him, as do a tiny waist, shapely legs and hips, and small breasts of a certain, perfect shape. I can see a woman with those features and know before he does that his head will track in her direction.

I don’t feel threatened by his looking, but validated.

I’m a feminist. I have been since I can remember. I want equal status. I want a career. I want to earn my own keep and not be someone’s property. I don’t want to be sexually objectified. I want equality in my marriage where I can contribute as an equal partner. My beliefs make my strong feelings about my hair and my tolerance of Ronald’s visual attractions seem out of place. My need for validation seems antithetical.

Yet they exist inside me, clashing and melding at once, seeming like a good mix that lends balance to the whole.

So after we had talked about my hair for the umpteenth time these last few years, I decided definitively to go gray, as if it is a journey to a destination. Part of what made it so definitive is that I’m having surgery at the end of the month on one of my feet, and hope to have the other foot done next month. It’s a huge undertaking that includes breaking and resetting bones. Painful, I’ve heard, but worth it, after bones shift and grow crooked and render one unstable while walking or standing. A welcome life change, so why not clean up all the things that are disabling?

Ronald agreed. I’ve been dyeing my hair since I was in my mid-thirties. He had been against it then. He loved the color of my hair, a mixture of browns, reds, golds, and the occasional grays, so much that he couldn’t imagine changing it. He didn’t think a bottle could ever capture the beauty he saw.

“If you dye a single hair on your head, I’ll know,” he averred.

I dyed it anyway. The hairdresser used a semi-permanent dye, very close to my real color. It took Ronald six months to notice. After that he was good with it. Close enough, I suppose.

Twenty years later, the ruse is tiring.  First it was every 8 weeks, then 5 weeks. Now I go every 4 weeks, and, even then, I feel anxious after week 3. Over the years I’ve gone from semi-permanent, to permanent, to demi-permanent after the permanent hair color nearly ruined my hair with its harsh chemicals.

I used to perm my hair in order to give it the body that fine, straight hair is lacking. Lots of people thought the unnaturally curly hair suited my Italian ethnicity. I guess curly hair is expected on a woman whose maiden name is Liuzzi, but I had to give up the perms in order to color – too many chemicals, my hairdresser up in Syracuse told me. It seemed a grand sacrifice at the time, but I’ve grown to enjoy my fine, straight hair, and I don’t miss the bottled curls.

Ronald and I celebrating our marriage. My hair is permed, not dyed, in this photo taken when I was twenty-six. 

Now I’m wondering if I will miss my “coffee bean” colored hair or if I will soon wonder why I ever stopped nature from taking its course.

I wanted to find out quickly what I thought about my real color. Hence my thought of “chopping it all off.” Hair grows back, after all, and mine grows quite quickly. One daughter, Cara, the one with very short hair, applauded my choice. The other, Mackenzie, the one with hair to the middle of her back, was silent.

I texted my hairdresser: “Don’t bother buying dye. Don’t freak out, but I want you to cut my hair short, a la Cara, as I decided to go gray.” She immediately dialed Cara to see if I had lost my mind.

At the bathroom mirror a week ago, I looked at Ronald using the straight razor to trim his salt and pepper mustache and beard, and I said, as I applied makeup, “Say good-bye to my hair. This time next week, I’m chopping it all off so I can skip the skunk stripe.”

He held the razor poised in the air as my statement sunk in. He said nothing then, but later that evening he said a lot.

“I support you going gray,” he said, “but I don’t understand why you want to cut your hair, too.”

‘The skunk stripe,” I said. It was so obvious to me. I couldn’t believe he didn’t get it.

“How bad can it be? It seems more drastic to do both.” Will he feel that way when his growing bald spot cries out for a total buzz? I’ve promised to let him know when it is time.

I had been so sure. I had photos on my laptop of cuts I thought would look good. Of course, they were on women all 30 years younger than I. When I drudged up a photo of Judi Dench sporting her pixie cut, I shuddered and promptly deleted it.

One of the photos I saved on my laptop so I could show my hairdresser how I wanted my hair cut short.

Here is Judi Dench. I think she is stunning but maybe I am not ready to admit that I look closer to her age than the age of the model above.

The next day I texted my hairdresser again, telling her I needed other suggestions because Ronald was emotional about the thought of short hair and going gray at the same time.  I respect his need to take one step at a time.

We had a text conversation, my hairdresser making suggestions such as highlighting, and I texting to say I’d think about it and finally suggesting I’d like her to cut my hair to the tops of my shoulders.

Yesterday Cara and I showed up for our appointments, and, as I sat in the chair, my hairdresser ran her hands through my hair, and the three of us talked about it.

“You are about 100% gray in front, about 50% at the crown, and a lot less in the back.  You won’t really know what it looks like until you grow it out.”

“I know,” I said.

Cara thought my new cut was adorable even with a luminescent crown of gray around the edge and through the part.

Ronald still hasn’t said a word about it, but sometimes that’s how we communicate in our equal partnership, through silence. It isn’t a condemnation; it’s a slow adjustment to change, not at all out of character. I've stunned him into silence on more than one occasion in our almost 40 years together, oftentimes with a dramatically different hair cut and just once with the announcement that we were having twins. I sit comfortably in the pocket of that silence, knowing that I am validated and he and I will be just fine even when the skunk stripe takes up residence on my head.

Let the skunk stripe begin! More on my journey to gray in future posts.

Fatal Attractiveness

Ashton Kutcher, sixteen years younger than his ex-wife Demi Moore, is grieving the end of his marriage by partying in Brazil with a bevy of young, beautiful models. In the meantime Demi struggles to heal and move on. This week she was hospitalized for a reaction to some drugs she took at a party she hosted at her home and is now headed to rehab for “exhaustion.” It is also rumored she is suffering from an eating disorder, possibly anorexia. She remarked in an interview with Harper’s Bizarre, "I would say what scares me is that I'm going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I'm really not lovable, that I'm not worthy of being loved. That there's something fundamentally wrong with me.”

At forty-nine Demi is five years younger than I am. I remember how beautiful I always thought she was and still is, but even beautiful women are plagued by vulnerability and insecurity. Society has us brainwashed, and men, too, to believe a woman is less than if her physical attributes don’t match a certain standard or when those attributes begin to change and fade with age. No matter how rationally and intellectually I view this issue, my emotions rule, and I find myself wondering if age will render me unlovable.

What can we learn from other cultures? That age brings the beauty of wisdom and the character of a life well lived.

(Excerpt from essay Staying on It: Beauty and Aging)

Norma, you're a woman of 50, now grow up. There's nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.

~ Joe Gillis played by William Holden

Sunset Boulevard (1950)                                               

Just a few months shy of nineteen, I held Ronald’s hand as we strolled across the quad at Syracuse University in the early spring of 1976. The day was unseasonably warm, and the sun turned my brunette hair a golden red. 

“Yo, Ronnie,” a light-skinned black man, whom I would discover was Ronald’s childhood friend, called out from across the quad.

“Yo, Bill,” Ronald shouted back, his voice giddy. “This is Dianne.” He held my hand up and twirled me around so his friend could see his girl.

Ronald made me feel beautiful that day and he still does when he pulls me close to him and says, “You look very Dianne today” or when he talks about my eyes and laments how they bedazzled him.

Ma didn’t make me feel beautiful. She made me feel ugly from the inside out. She called me Witch Hazel, banshee and a hateful child. I thought that meant I was so filled with hate no one could ever love me. I imagined the hate seeped out of my soul through my skin and hair, making dirt cling to me and my hair twist and knot.

Ma’s German-born friend, a member of the Overseas Wives Club, looked at me one day when she was visiting us and shook her head. “She’s pallid. She looks sickly,” she said, as if I weren’t sitting right in front of her.

I can only remember two times when Dad said something about the way I looked. The first was when I was seventeen, and I cut my waist-length hair. He drove me to the beauty salon, the first time I had ever been to one and the first time someone who wasn’t Ma or a neighbor cut my hair. Dad sat out in the car and waited. I watched in the mirror as the hairdresser, a small, olive-skinned, deaf man, sheared off my long locks. I had asked him to save my hair, but he had misunderstood or forgotten, and piles of hair lay on the floor around the chair. Then he curled and sprayed, and I didn’t recognize myself. I thought maybe it was because he was deaf, and he hadn’t understood the style I wanted. As I approached the car, I saw Dad with his arm resting atop the open window, staring straight ahead. When he heard me, he turned, looked me up and down and said, “I don’t like it.”

I cried on the way home, and Ma led me into the bathroom and wet down the curls so they looked more natural.

By my eighteenth birthday, I had let my hair grow to my shoulders and had learned how to style it using a newly marketed handheld blow dryer and a round brush. That evening, dressed to go out with friends, I posed for pictures. In one of them I sit on the arm of the dark green sofa, leaning back seductively, my left hand on my hip, my chin up, and my legs crossed. My hair is feathered a la Farrah Fawcett. I wear aviator glasses, a fitted red T-shirt tucked into a denim miniskirt, and four-inch cork-heeled wedges.

When I came out of my bedroom, Dad whistled.

“Wow!” he exclaimed and my Uncle Rocco, who had stopped over for coffee, nodded approvingly. That was the first time I felt beautiful.

As I matured, Ma pointed out my flaws. “If I had a nickel, I’d stick it in the slot and get on the bus,” she mused while looking at my backside one day.

I don’t think Ma really saw me as ugly; she was bemoaning her own loss of youth and looks and taking it out on the person who most reminded her that they were fading. As a young woman during World War II, she had captured the attention of the soldiers stationed in her hometown of Ryde, Australia, including Dad, with her buxom figure, long legs, and her bawdy sense of humor.

She fretted as I matured, and maybe hoped if I remained a child, she might stop aging. I fought in vain with her to buy me a training bra when I turned twelve. It was embarrassing to be one of the few girls still wearing undershirts. I was so thrilled when I finally got one that I lifted my shirt up to show Dad.

Ma wouldn’t teach me how to pluck my brows or shave my legs, despite the teasing I got in middle school from the boys.  She worried I was too young to handle tweezers and a razor, but I solved my brow problem.  I squeezed two quarters together and yanked, over and over, until I had made my unibrow into two smooth brows that framed my large eyes. My soon-to-be sister-in-law taught me how to use Nair on my legs one day during one of Ma’s many hospital stays. Forty-two years later, I pluck my brows daily and call Sundays my hair removal day: top lip, under arms, legs and pubic area.

Now I see my own loss of youth and beauty. In seven years I’ll be the same age Ma was when she had a heart attack and died at sixty-one years old.