Hair, identity, ageism and a pinch of joy
/My mother tells me that she cut my long, wispy, ultra-tangly, white-blonde hair when I was five years old. Being a highly-opinionated and strong-willed child, I apparently screamed at her in a rage. She never did that again.
Eventually, I let her trim the split ends off of my wild mop of hair as a teenager, but I was highly sensitive to how much it was cut. I’m not sure where exactly I got this relationship to my hair.
I think part of it came from my family’s counterculture identity, which I clung to desperately. I was viciously rejected by kids in the small-town school I attended, because of my strange, wiggly, near-sighted eyes and my inability to adopt the subservient, non-centered role that might have won me pity rather than aggression. One of my reactions to that was to brandish my family’s counterculture identity like a shield, possibly as a way to beg the question: Was I really rejected because of something individual to me or was it a consequence of the clash of tribes?
This is me at a hippie-gathering c. 1979
And hair was part of that clash. The men in our family didn’t cut their hair when I was little as a statement of rebellion. My father and older brother both had long, lustrous locks, both thicker and much more easily brushed than mine. My father’s was a a rich, sun-streaked oak brown. My brother’s was golden as a cherub’s. My much thinner, flimsier and frizzier hair was bleached so nearly white that doctors speculated that my vision problems might be related to albinism, though I wasn’t a real albino.
The issue of girls’ hair was not nearly as culturally sensitive. Some girls in our circle did have short hair, often shorter than the boys. But somehow it stuck in my mind that long hair was part of family and clan unity, something I desperately needed.
That is why I had very long, very light hair as a young adult, a feature that stood out wherever I went, and particularly when I traveled in places where black hair was in the majority. It was, in fact, an ice breaker that gained me friendly hospitality in far flung places on more than one occasion.
One of my favorite memories is when I sat on the edge of a massive cliff in front of a Nepali village in the morning to brush my hair and thus attracted a gaggle of young women, who gathered around me with their own brushes and combed one another’s hair and my hair while the sun came up over the Himalayas in a dazzle of warm pastels.
By then, I knew that I had been right as a child. My long hair was an asset that I should never cut. It was finicky and difficult though. Brushing it was often a chore and washing it with the standard, commercial shampoos and conditioners I could afford was a recipe for pain, frustration and a lot of breakage.
I certainly never dyed it. Not only was its color firmly engrained in my identity as well, I was also afraid of what the harsh chemicals in hair dye would do to my already fragile and precarious hair.
Over the years, my white-blonde hair turned a bit darker, with dirty-looking streaks underneath. Sunlight still bleached the upper layer and no matter what hairstyle I tried, it always frizzed out around my face, making me look a bit like a mad scientist and acquiring terrible tangles. It looked best when left down in long, flowing locks, but given how fine and fly-away it was, the slightest breeze or any movement on my part resulted in a tangle that would take an hour or more to brush and leave me with fist-fulls of broken hair that progressively thinned what I had.
Eventually, I discovered through trial and error that the only brush that will handle my hair both gently and thoroughly is an afro pick. White people usually don’t know what exactly these are supposed to be for, so they just assume that’s what I like. Black people tend to give me confused (or sometimes amused) looks. My hair is about as different from African hair as it is possible to get, but that’s simply the only thing that works well.
Finally, in my late thirties my hair started going gray. As with the dark streaks it didn’t go gray in any decent way, just in unsightly patches. One year, I thought my hair was all going to fall out because even with the picks and expensive hair products, I ended up with ever larger fistfuls of fallen and broken hair when I brushed.
And that was around the time when I noticed that strangers started treating me differently. I’ve always gotten some strange looks from people on the street, especially if I don’t carry a white cane as explanation for my strange-looking eyes and my occasional odd way of walking or peering at objects. But this change was different.
When I was younger, everyone from officials to shop-keepers usually defaulted to kindness toward me, often condescendingly so, if they realized I was mostly blind. Still, in a wide variety of cultures, I had generally positive experiences with people I had never met before once I was out of the bullying ring of school. The issue of being actual friends with a blind person was always a different matter, but interactions were pleasant enough when they remained on an anonymous surface level.
Here’s my hair while I’m teaching ESL classes in a remote mountain cabin in the Czech Republic in 2016
That started to change in my late thirties. People in positions of authority are less likely to have mercy on me. Random strangers are less likely to stop and answer kindly if I ask for directions. Shop assistants are less likely to willingly help me. It feels as if I somehow lost a bit of my white privilege. That has made me wonder if I used to pass as abled a lot more than I thought. Maybe it is perceived abled privilege I lost. But I also see another possibility.
I think it’s ageism. The changes correlated exactly with the graying of my hair and the roughening of my face. And it tends to be a lot worse when I am not wearing a hat. So, there’s that.
Last year, when I was part of climate change protests and we had several of our own photographers taking thousands of pictures, I noted that although the core group was only about thirty people of which I was one of the most active, there was not one picture that showed my face in our database after several months. Every other person in the group was pictured many times.
Most of the people in the group were young. This is climate activism after all. But the few older men were seen in pictures. And two other women over forty were also in pictures, though not very often. Their hair was dyed and you couldn’t readily see their age.
But I was invisible. I was too busy to notice for many months until I was browsing the photo archives for an article, and the complete lack was striking enough to stand out.
That’s what I’ve been told happens to older women. After a certain age, you disappear.
I have never been very vain or hung up on appearances in general. My mother also says that when I was fourteen I told her I couldn’t believe people actually cared that much about visual first impressions. Since I couldn’t see such things and objective measures show first impressions to be misleading, I couldn’t imagine how it could be that important.
I did dress up for job interviews and wear professional clothing to work, but I saw this as more of a uniform than a ploy to make good first impressions. It was my positive attitude, skills and intellect I counted on to get me through doors. And for awhile, that worked.
I was fortunate enough to have a face that more fashion-conscious women told me didn’t desperately need makeup. I was young and healthy. and I did have that striking hair. So, until I started to age, doors were generally open to me.
That was another thing that closed down hard and fast in my mid-thirties. I can get tutoring jobs. I guess teachers are allowed to look old. I can get the occasional online writing gig where the image of my face is never considered. But I can’t get any other kind of job no matter how well my qualifications fit.
And networking to get ahead… Not a chance. That’s all about first impressions. I know that now.
Picking black berries in autumn color
A few years back I acquired a tutoring student who is a country manager at a major hair-care company. And she often commented on options for my hair and brought me samples of the company’s products. These helped to slow the shedding and breakage of my hair. And she introduced me to the idea of using natural henna and other herbs to dye my hair.
At first, the whole idea of dying my hair was disturbing. The color was almost as much a part of my identity. as the length. But somewhere, deep down, I had always had a desire for red hair, since the days when my idol was the cartoon of the Strawberry Shortcake doll and my primary imaginary friend in looked like her.
Then there was my long love-affair with Anne of Green Gables as a.teen in a household that only got educational television. One way or another, in my generation blonde was sort of considered “desirable” but at the same time blondes were ridiculed. Red-heads seemed to be somehow outside the rules of fashion and usually both strong and independent.
And of course, the main shade henna does is red.
But the hair-care manager insisted that this kind of natural hair dying could only be done at a salon with complicated methods and equipment. That was a step too far. Even if it weren’t an extravagant expense, I’m a DYI kind of girl. So, I still hesitated—until a red-headed friend from the Bohemian highlands told me that she colors the gray spots in her own hair with henna and that it is possible to do alone.
So, finally I found a source of a completely herbal hair dye and tried it. The first shade I used barely gave my hair a gold tint. So, I went for one that promised a much darker red than I initially wanted. The result was perfect, just the shade of strawberry blonde I had always wanted.
Here’s my new look.
I dyed my hair one sunny early autumn day when I was at home alone and waited to see what my husband would say about it. He was actually struck speechless for a moment and then showed uncertainty and concern. Had I done something rash again that would have negative social consequences? My son was equally disconcerted.
Finally, I found a few people online who liked my new color, but the response wasn’t unanimous, except from my ESL class of older women. They were all enthusiastic and their delight looked genuine enough.
But the thing that really let me know it is a good thing is that I can’t help smiling every time I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I haven’t enjoyed looking at myself at all in years, and I don’t think I ever actually felt good about my appearance. In some ways that’s enough for me.
So, I’ve learned that appearances do matter much more than reason dictates. I’ve found out what happens when people just don’t like the look of someone and what happens when a woman crosses the boundary into looking old.
I don’t like it and I see the dismissal of older women as a key component of our society’s patriarchal disease, but I have also accepted that it is our current reality. And I’ve realized a long-held, somewhat frivolous wish.
Am I buying in to the patriarchy by coloring my hair and hiding my gray? Some may think so. It causes me a twinge, but the joy I feel at having this one little bit of vanity for the first time outweighs it. I would have felt the same joy even if my hair wasn’t gray, but I didn’t know about or have access to a healthy hair dye in those years.
I hope you are likewise able to fulfill a wish every now and then (even one that is important to your heart). Fulfilling a wish beyond that necessary for survival gives joy in this time of Covid-19. Use these changes, whatever they may be in your circumstances to try something you always wanted to.
Keep your convictions strong. Keep openness and care for those who are cast out. After all, we are the ones who become the change..
