Wow, you have grey hair.
We were leaving his house after I'd brought the kids over to visit. It was a rainy day so he was holding an umbrella over me as I buckled my children in. For the extended amount of time it took for me to secure my children into the car and for the closeness of our proximity due to holding an umbrella over both of us, my dad noticed.
On the drive home, I cried. I didn't cry because he noticed my grey hair. I've noticed it myself for decades. I was crying because he didn't remember or he didn't remember to the extent I wished he would have. Because you know what? I showed it to him nearly 20 years ago, and he shrugged it off.
I was about 14 years old. I couldn't drive myself yet. Somehow, I made the decision to ask my dad a question that evening. I went up to him in the kitchen, the west side of the room. I remember our positions almost exactly. My dad's back was toward our second refrigerator facing me. I was standing next to the corner of our kitchen island facing the breakfast table, adjacent to him. It was evening time, dark outside. The Tiffany chandelier above our breakfast table lit the room with a yellow glow. I went up to him and said something along the lines of, "Daddy, I have grey hair. Can I dye it?"
He responded, "You have grey hair? I don't see any." I lifted the top half of my hair to reveal where the majority of it was. He took a quick look and shrugged it off. "Oh, that's not that much. Hair dye can irritate your scalp and make you itchy, You don't need it." Little did he know the things my friends said to me at school or how self-conscious I was.
After that, I made a mental note not to share things like this with my dad. I felt so unheard and ignored in that moment. I knew when I could get myself to the store without him, I was going to buy my own hair dye, and that's exactly what I did. I started coloring my own hair in the summer of 2006.
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The last time I dyed my hair was December 2022. It wasn't a conscious choice to stop, but I'd already reached a point where I wasn't dyeing it consistently anymore. Maybe only 2-3 times a year. Around the time I would have dyed it, I started having some health problems. And somehow between life and the way I was feeling, I decided I would not continue to dye it. If I didn't feel this way, I would continue to color my hair, but I'm secretly lazy. So these two sides of me have been fighting each other. It's been almost 13 months, the longest I've ever gone without hair dye in almost 18 years.
I told myself I wanted to write a series about my experiences and memories with regard to my hair. A lot of them are painful. A lot of them are filled with bitterness and anger. But I want to share it because it is a part of who I am today. And I don't know who needs to read and know about it, but someone might. Why else would women join the silver sisters movement on social media? They want to know they're not alone.
That's something I've had to come to terms with before I could comfortably do this. Because all my life, I was feeding myself emotional lies based on real life experiences: Your grey hair is weird. You're a grandma! Grey hair is disgusting. What's wrong with you? You're so old. It looks really bad. It would look much better colored. Oh, wow, that's a lot of grey.
I can't even write out these phrases without getting emotional because they're so deeply rooted with individual experiences I've had throughout the last 20 years and they resonate with statements people have said to me. But I picked this year as the year to tell my story and share all the memories I've buried and hidden for two decades. My dad's statement hurt because it took him two decades to understand what I was feeling as a teenager. But I'm not 14 anymore.
So in this series, I want to take you through these 20 years with me and discover the experiences, the memories, and the unexpected encouragements along the way.
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