Going Gray

I’m going gray. I can no longer keep up with the plucking that turns me into a cross-eyed mad woman every night. I’m afraid if I continue plucking this amount of gray, my eyes will seriously stick that way. It’s like a spore explodes on my scalp and dozens of kinky grays crop up overnight, growing in at zigzagged angles like worn fishing line.

It’s time to think about coloring, a task I had hoped to hold off until my 40s. The maintenance and cost do not excite me. Having to keep up with getting my roots done, deciding on a color. None of this thrills me. I like the color of my own hair—minus the current silver pinstripes. The thought of a different hair color, unfortunately, thrills my hub. I like dark; he likes blonde.

Changing my hair color scares me. Some people do it with abandon. I really don’t want to stand out. I don’t want change. I don’t want people to notice. But before long this bride-of-Frankenstein look will get more attention than I desire.

I’m the kind of person who picks out a paint color and then I go one brighter because I really want people to see the color. I don’t just want a hint of it. Then my husband paints away, whistling while he works. I see it smeared all over the walls and immediately despise it. I quietly live with it for a while because I know change takes time for me. I usually grow to like it. But what if I hate my hair color this way? What if I can’t look at myself in the mirror? What if I don’t want anyone else to see me either? I am too cheap to get it colored again, but walking around with pumpkin orange locks, even for a day, frightens me.

It would be nice if hair salons had a color-matching system like they do at home improvement stores. I could pluck some of the good hairs out, the really pretty golden brown ones, and they could mix up a batch of hair color to match. That I think I could handle.