Going Gray (cefully)?

I'm aggressively going gray.

There.  I said it.

For my whole life, one of my most immediately defining characteristics has been my red hair.  Beyond a short period after birth when it was bright carrot orange, then  a deeper brownish red, then a light strawberry blonde in the summer at about age 2 (at least in all the old pictures, anyway, and curly as all get out -- hello, Orphan Annie!), my hair has been a fairly mid-range auburn-y red pretty much ever since.

I've had highlights done, gotten perms, had short layered dos and long curly Miss America dos -- whatever -- through the years.  But the consistent truth of my life is that I have always been a redhead.

I like being a redhead.  Love it, in fact.

That hasn't always been the case.  But I've grown into a confidence with it through the years to outright owning my redheaded pride in being a little different.  Frankly, for the last couple of decades, I've sort of defined myself by my sassy red hair.

Hell, when I started political blogging, my moniker was "ReddHedd," for heaven's sakes.  When I met my husband, one of the first things he loved about me was my red hair -- he's always had " a thing" for redheads, it seems, and it's one of the things that drew him to walk down the hallway to meet that "redhead" talking with a friend of his. 

Honestly?  Just thinking about not being a redhead as I'm typing this is making me well up.  I kid you not, a tear just rolled down my cheek.  Over hair color.  How crazy is that?!?

So what does a girl do when that is no longer true?  In my case, I panicked.  Well and truly panicked.


After going through what we did with fertility hell for almost 7 years, and then finally, blessedly, having our miracle when I was 35?  I just wasn't ready to go gray yet.  The thought of being seen as my own child's grandmother scared the hell out of me.  I had that experience the first time I ever took her out grocery shopping right after her birth -- the check-out lady thought I was The Peanut's grandmother and I burst into tears in the check-out line.  (Pregnancy hormones are killer, aren't they?)

The problem is this:  the women in my family go gray really early.  I started finding gray hairs when I was in my first year in college.  But it was a here or there thing, so it looked like really bright highlights among the red, so no big deal, right?

As I've gotten older, though?  It's coming in more and more aggressively.  Adding lupus medication to the mix has made it worse, and to add to that I had a huge patch of gray right in the front of my hair that has now spread to all over.

So, as I said, I panicked.

For the last year and a half or so, I've been going to a wonderful hairdresser who has been keeping my hair colored -- sometimes a little darker, sometimes a little lighter -- because matching my personal shade of hair color turns out to be really, really hard.  She's been wonderful about tweaking it to try and find something I'm happy with that doesn't look utterly and completely fake on me.  And she knows how to work with my thick, unruly hair which is akin to a miracle for me.

The problem?

I'm a fraud.  A fake.  A phony.  And it is bugging the crap out of me, because I've worked very hard to be true to myself and not be the sort of faux person who shows one face in public and another in private.  And yet?  Here I am doing just that with my hair.

Why do I say this?  Because I haven't been back to the hairdresser in about 6 weeks, due to unexpected family trauma really and not because I've avoided the salon.  But my roots are coming in and showing up in a big way right now.  I can clearly see that my natural hair is no longer red with a few silvery-white strands, it's that stark a contrast.

It's pretty much silvery-white with a few red strands.

And, I have to admit, the roots are a really pretty color.  Really pretty.  But they aren't red.  Which means if I let them grow out and stop panicking about the gray, I'll no longer be that sassy redhead that took me years of my life to love.  I'll be something else entirely.

I'll still be me, don't get me wrong.  But I won't be the sassy redhead in the crowd any more.

Can I do that?  Of course I can...but do I want to do it?  Do I have the courage to do it?  Because for me, it would take courage -- I'm 42 years old, for heaven's sakes, and feeling a lot sexier and more confident now than I ever did in my 20s.  How would I feel with gray hair?  Would it be the same -- or would I feel washed out and aged somehow?  How can I know if I don't give it a try, though?  But if I give it a try, then everyone who sees me will know I'm going gray and any color I decide to put in after that will brand me as a woman faking her hair color for all the world to see, right?  (Of course, by writing this, I've pretty much outed myself on the gray hair thing anyway, haven't I?)

Frankly, my husband has been really, really supportive of the idea of me just letting my hair go gray.  He thinks the silvery gray in my hair looks hot, or at least he says it does.

My husband went gray early, too -- while we were in law school together, he started getting steel gray strands that have matured into a nice salt and pepper gray that looks really good on him.  But he also has been mistaken for my dad, let alone our child's grandfather, and although he says it doesn't bug him, can that really be true at the core?  Men see that sort of thing differently sometimes, so maybe yes.  But could I be okay with that?

It's a dilemma.  So I'm asking your advice, dear readers.

How have you dealt with this?  Is it this much of a struggle for everyone?  It's such a personal issue, and women so rarely talk about this sort of thing because we don't want to embarrass each other or put anyone on the spot, but I cannot stand feeling like one of those ladies who does the color rinse that looks utterly and completely fake to all the world just to salve her own need to ignore her wrinkles and experiences just to recapture her youth.

At the same time, though, I am not remotely ready to feel older, to look older, or to present myself as not caring any more.   But that sounds awful, doesn't it?  Frankly, it sounds like something my mother would say, which is horrifying enough in and of itself -- she's never, ever let herself come close to going gray, and will avoid it pretty much forever if she can, I'm certain.

Well, that's a point in favor of going gray for me right there.  (I'm only laughing a little bit at that.) 

I mean, honestly, a lot of these women look hot, so why couldn't I do so as well?  Why does the thought of going gray make me so freaked out, though?  Is it the gray -- or the lack of being a redhead?

I'm serious about wanting to hear how you've dealt with this.

Those of you who have gone gray -- it seems like it would be awfully liberating in a lot of ways.  Is it?  And for those of you who haven't, how do you deal with long-term coloring?  Because it seems like an awful lot of work given how quickly my hair grows (still over an inch a month for me). 

Give it to me straight on something really, really personal for most women:  to gray or not to gray?

(Photo of some lovely roots via mutbka.)