Since my first/last hair post, I worked up the courage to follow many of your suggestions. I got a pixie cut. Here’s a photo, in case you missed it. No color was added or removed. The colors you see are what hairstylist Donna Rose had to work with: part dyed brown, part gray, and part highlighted a few months ago.
My instructions to Donna: Super short, but still cute and girly. I didn’t want to look like a boy, or a granny, or butchy (no offense to any of those groups). No shaved head parts whatsoever for me.
A whirling dervish with scissors, it took Donna 45 minutes to lop off enough hair to fill a jumbo dustpan. And then it was done. My hair was gone. No going back. But I liked it. I thought it looked mod and perky. When I got together with friends that night they flipped and said they loved it, even my friend who had begged me to not go gray until I was much, much older.
The morning after was the hardest part, when I looked in the mirror and saw my expertly-Donna-styled short hair fanned up in many directions, nothing like the look in the photo, above, but more of what I’d call nursing home pillow hair. And when I washed my hair for the first time, it felt as if I were bald.
There’s also the reality that I’m an identical twin, and my sister is still very much a long-haired brunette, and plans to stay that way for a while. I am seven minutes older, but if the day comes when we’re out somewhere and someone guesses that I’m seven years older … well, that will be a bitter pill to swallow. I’d tell you the story from our late teen years about the time that we were both going to get matching Dorothy Hamill haircuts, and the hairdresser took me first, and when Shelly saw my formerly long silky hair chopped up by my ears, Shelly backed out. I was stuck with my Dorothy Hamill haircut, and Shelly kept her long, flowing beautiful hair. I won’t tell that story because Shelly is sick of hearing it.
But like the time I got the DH haircut, the same is true now. I made my own choice.
Now, I’ve adapted to the fact that “low maintenance” short hair is not no-maintenance hair. I can’t just get up and go. Considering my hair in its weird newly wavy state, when it’s wet, I have to hit it with a hair blower and some “toffee” (a sticky hair product) to control it, or I look like Richard Simmons. But the whole process literally takes 5 minutes. I’ve timed it. The thing is, my hair hasn’t looked the same two days in a row. I’ve actually brought a photo of me with Donna’s Day 1 pixie into the bathroom as I do my hair, and I have yet to replicate that look. But that’s OK. The concept is there.
Since my drastic haircut many people have described me as “brave” for cutting my hair off and embracing the gray, which makes me wonder why. Why is it brave to look my age? Why is it brave to “give up” my long hair? Why is it brave to accept and even embrace my real hair color?
I think it has something to do with the term “giving up” – which is the way in which I think some people see my process. I guess she’s given up trying to be attractive. What’s next? No make-up, no bra, elastic-waist pants and orthopedic shoes?
I was talking to son Joe about his whole hair thing on Skype this week (bless his heart for listening) and I mentioned that I finally figured out the reason why I was really afraid to “let myself go” gray. The revelation hit me last week when I saw a woman – a bit older than I am – in a store. She had bright red hair, except that about 4 inches of her roots were stark white.
My first thought. Wow, that’s really ugly.
My second thought: Poor thing. She doesn’t have enough money to color her hair.
Bingo. That was it.
It was the being-perceived-as-poor part that was giving me pause. As someone who grew up in poverty, being looked upon as poor pushes all kinds of buttons for me. To this day, when I look at people with straight, perfect teeth (which I lack), I immediately assume they grew up affluent, and cared for.
Also, secondary to being seen as “too poor” to afford hair color is the perception that I’d just “given up” or that I was “letting myself go”.
She’s really let herself go. For a woman, there are few criticisms that cut as deeply as those words.
Joe’s reaction?
“Mom, what do you care what people think about you?”
Oh, my wise, wise child.
So, here I go.
The plan is for Donna to cut my hair about every four to five weeks, and with each haircut, more of my gray hair will have grown out. She figures it’ll take about four cuts before my final hair color emerges. By August, my hair should be well on its way to complete transformation, and by fall it should be a total eclipse of my former brunette color.
In the meantime, I will try to ignore people’s eyes staring at my shimmery crown as they speak to me (hey, my breasts are down here … kidding). I will try to not over-react when I see a super elderly woman with my hair cut. I will try to not over-analyze the thing I know about myself that whenever I’m going through a huge emotional change (a birth, divorce, a breakup, another divorce, career crash) I tend to do something wild and crazy with my hair. My hair is the canary in my mind shaft, and it lets me know when something’s amiss.
Instead, I will do my best to let the months come and occupy my mind with other more important stuff than my dang hair. And come fall, when my hair is totally silver or white or whatever, then I’ll reassess where to go from there. My gut feeling is that I will drift back to my shoulder-length hair, which I’ve had most of my adult life.
Unless I fall in love with this pixie. Yes, I’m just that brave.
Independent online journalist Doni Chamberlain founded what’s now known as anewscafe.com in 2007 with her son, Joe Domke of the Czech Republic. Prior to 2007 Chamberlain was an award-winning newspaper opinion columnist, feature and food writer recognized by the Associated Press, the California Newspaper Publishers Association and E.W. Scripps. She lives in Redding, CA.
