Wild hairs

Middle age is a trip. In your head, you’re still a kid. But your body has decided to utterly betray you. (Well, mine has, anyway.) It’s a tale as old as time . . . you ache when you’ve done nothing but sneeze or roll over in bed the wrong way. (I know someone who actually cracked a rib coughing.) Skin sags or wrinkles or has a weird brown spot that wasn’t there yesterday, but is definitely there today, taunting you with the smugness of a liver spot. But the real betrayal, or at least the one that I am the most furious about, is the hair. Every hair on my body has decided to revolt against me, as if I haven’t conditioned and cared for it lovingly for years.

The hair on my head started taunting me years ago, as if some great foreshadow of what to expect at 40, when it would simply give up altogether. Grey hairs began to spring from my scalp when I was 19 years old. I callously plucked them (despite my mother’s promise that 10 new ones would grow in its place-- well, Mom, you were right about that, too!). I was not about to let this white menace boss me around. Oh no. I was going to take the hair by the tweezers and win the war that not one person alive or dead had yet won against grey hair. Ah, the sweet bloom (and naivete) of youth. And, so it was that I began dyeing my hair to cover the grey before I was even out of college. 

In those days, it was a box of Miss Clairol and 30 minutes wash-and-go once every six to eight weeks. A few times a year, I’d splurge on a professional job with highlights and lowlights and whatever else they had to offer. Today, it’s the same damn box, and 2 hours of my life sitting, stinking, while the dye does its level best to fight resistant greys that refuse to turn brown. I’ve even gotten to the point where I have to use a toothbrush to get the glistening grey baby hairs around my hairline, because otherwise, I end up with a halo of white. It’s excruciating and infuriating and I hate every minute of it. 

It’s usually about two weeks before the roots rear their ugly heads (man, those fuckers are ugly), and three to four weeks before I can steel my resolve to begin the process all over again. If I wait much longer than that, I can hardly stand to look at myself -- which I end up doing an awful lot of these days with the proliferation of video calls for work. (And, even when I’ve gone to have my hair professionally colored, it’s still that two-week window -- or less -- before I see the little white bastards popping up again.)

I suppose I shouldn’t complain, because I still have my hair. And it’s not half bad, when it’s been freshly colored. It’s shiny and brown, and pretty thick. But oh, those greys. They are a nuisance. I’ve considered giving up, giving in, and going grey. But every time I do, I let my hair grow out a little longer, my roots a little more prominent, and I look like an aging hippy or Frankie from Grace and Frankie and I realize I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. And so I make my date with Miss Clairol again . . .

I could live with the betrayal of the greys on my head if they weren’t migrating elsewhere, too. Like my eyebrows. Which are jet black. And have always been jet black. So it’s extra noticeable when a white hair reveals itself. Currently, there are three. One in each eyebrow, and one, smack in the middle, right between my eyes, like the ghost of Freda Kahlo, taunting me from beyond the grave. Like an angry unicorn that never lived up to its full potential. The worst part about this nuisance hair is that I never seem to notice it until it’s at least a quarter of an inch long. I know it’s coming. I watch for it. And suddenly, there it is, long and waving in the breeze, in the middle of my face, as if it’s always been there and I’m the fool who never noticed it before. I tweeze it out with a fury. And still it returns, with its sisters on the left and right, at capricious intervals just so I have to always deal with one of them and not all three at the same time. 

Still, Freda Kahlo’s unicorn isn’t the worst of my hair woes. Because of course it gets worse. I am now showing the early stages of growing a goatee. It started with one black baby hair 15 or so years ago. It, like the unicorn, would pop up, fully formed every quarter or so . . . like my credit union bank statement. And I’d tweeze it and forget for another few months. No more. It’s got friends. Angry, rough, vengeful friends. The kind of friends who come from the bad part of town and carry switchblades. Friends who show up uninvited to the party and don’t even bring a bottle of wine. Friends who refuse to leave. Friends who have no manners. These hairs are the Sweathogs of friends. 

These angry chin hair friends get dealt with on a daily basis. Because for every one I tweeze away with a curse and resignation, forty-two more spring up in its stead. And now, as if to make matters worse, some of those are turning grey, too. Because of course they are. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, when it was clear I wouldn’t be going anywhere for awhile, I thought, “Hmm, maybe I’ll just let them grow. Maybe I’ll see if it’s as bad as I think it will be. I’ll be devil-may-care about it all and embrace my natural state.” And so I did. For about three weeks. At one point, my husband asked how long my experiment was going to go on. I could tell he wanted to dissuade me, but knew if he tried, I’d dig in my heels and keep going. One day, though, I took a selfie and -- oh god -- I could see the hairs in the picture, catching the sunlight and taunting me. Also, I began to worry that if I got the virus, I’d end up in the hospital with nobody to tweeze my chin (because, obviously there would be much bigger things to worry about) and weeks later, if I survived, I’d have a full fledged beard. It was a worry I did not need to cultivate alongside my usual existential dread. And my chin hairs did not need a several-week head start. That was it. It was over. The fun had been had (it was not fun, by the way), and it was time for my trusty tweezers to get down off the shelf. 

All of this maintenance takes an awful lot of my time. Time where I could be writing the Great American Novel. Or training for a marathon. Or making a sourdough starter. But I’m not. I’m dyeing and tweezing and cursing. But trust me, it’s for your benefit as much as mine -- a wild grey-haired woman with a goatee isn’t pretty to look at. Besides, who am I kidding, ain’t no way I’m running a marathon, whether my hair behaves or not, and I don’t even like sourdough.