When I decided to keep the white hair my no-salon pandemic life had handed me, I crowed about saving myself the time and trouble of coloring it.
“My new white blond is starting to feel like a pandemic accomplishment I don’t want to undo – a sort of souvenir,” I wrote in this column then. “To color it over now to ordinary blond seems almost like erasing a hard-earned part of my life.”
I have stuck with this commitment to white hair even as friends have rushed back to the shampoo bowl and emerged with a golden glow.
I even joined a Facebook group called Going Gorgeously Gray, in which gray- and white-haired women cheered each other on – many of them sporting waist-length locks in defiance of the idea that older women must wear their hair short.
But I have to confess that the venture has taken an unexpected turn. I haven’t saved all the time and money I had bragged that I would. Instead, I’ve just spent time and money elsewhere, making sure that my white-haired self didn’t fall victim to the stereotypes of aging.
First, there was the haircut.
When a still-blond friend commented that the do I’d long sported looked “like a helmet,” I immediately filled in the words “and very dated” and changed not only the haircut but the stylist – opting for a 30-something with a cheeky attitude and a pair of fast-moving scissors. Voila! I emerged with my ears showing for the first time in years and a few long locks on top only because I said, “Wait!”
Despite the teaching of Going Gorgeously Gray, I’ve rarely had interest in hair so long that it takes more than a few minutes with a hand blower. But with shorter hair, earrings become a must. As a blonde, I’d only worn studs – for so long that my daughter-in-law had to wrest them from my ears.
“Now you can wear dangly ones!” friends cheered. Except that I had almost no dangly ones, and the ones I did have were the wrong color. White hair, I learned, demanded silver, not gold, and nothing brownish or orangey. Life was getting complicated.
At the risk of dating myself, I will confess that I sent off for one of those books, popular in the 1980s, that lets you know which season you are – winter, spring, summer or fall. Since white hair apparently had shifted me back from a spring blonde to a winter, I ripped out the winter page with its color squares of just-right hues, discarded the rest and walked along the row of coat hangers in my closet. Uh-oh.
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Let’s just say that a “spring” friend got a handful of gold earrings, and Goodwill got a load of otherwise perfectly good clothes for all those still-blondes out there. With my own wardrobe dramatically reduced, I was pawing through thrift-store racks and sale catalogs for acceptable colors. Purple! Teal! Bluish red!
But the anti-aging quest didn’t end with earrings and clothes. It quickly found its way to technology when a discussion group I was facilitating required that I show video clips on Zoom and again when my 9-year-old grandson acquired a Gizmo watch.
Once, a year earlier, I had succeeded in sharing a video clip and playing it full size with sound. But the magic formula now escaped me, and I spent the better part of a day reading instructions and practicing with friends so that I wouldn’t come off as an aging technophobe. I’m not sure my blonde self would have worked quite so hard.
The bigger challenge came with my grandson’s Gizmo watch.
“Just download the app,” my son said casually. “We listed you as a trusted contact.” Somehow it felt important for a trusted contact to be available in emergencies.
But I couldn’t get the Gizmo to work, and I didn’t want to be that grandmother who struggled with technology. I Googled. I called my cellphone provider. No answers. Finally, I just called my grandson’s new Gizmo phone number.
“Hi, Pat!” he said brightly, and then corrected himself. “I mean Grandma.”
At that moment, “Pat” felt exactly right.
Balancing Act author Pat Snyder is a Beechwold resident and life-balance speaker and coach. Read her work at patsnyderonline.com.
