Hey hey! I'm grey!
It's a faffy, faffy thing, going au naturel.
I started the transition two years ago, when I realised my hair was getting lighter, my body wasn’t, and that fighting what happens to us all didn’t make a lot of sense. My Facebook announcement at the time explained I'd reached an age I'd rather internalise pies than patriarchy. This is a position I continue to hold.
If your hair’s dyed dark, as mine was, you need to go grey gradually, lightening the dyed portion until it finally matches your real colour. That's unless you're daring enough to go cold turkey and have starkly two-tone hair, which I wasn't. This avo, my hairdresser snipped off the last of my artificially-tinged ends. It was done.
Like pretty much all women, I have feelings about aging. I remember how in my early forties, the first hints I could be perimenopausal showed up. It was a little sooner than I might’ve expected, but not out of the ordinary or anything to worry about. And yet for all my feminism, the initial signs of a winding-down womb threw me into a kind of grieving process. It wasn’t that I wanted more kids: I’d roughly achieved the quantity and quality I was aiming for. Rather, I realised my identity was way more tied up with my fertility - with the ideal of being young - than I’d wanted to believe.
Now I’m forty-nine.
On one hand, I can confirm that the invisibility of middle-aged women is a thing. When you move out of the demographic we’re taught is desirable, some will look at you differently or not at all. On the other hand, I feel more visible than ever. And I’m visible for the reasons I want to be. I trust my judgement and I’m not scared to speak. People don’t talk over me, and they think about what I’ve said. And I feel so much braver: on a good day, afraid of almost nothing except spiders and carrot and parsnip mashed together. I almost can’t believe the brazen and nutty shit an inattentive world lets a middle-aged lady get away with.
I craved these things as a younger woman, but I couldn’t quite imagine what it would feel like to have them. I can tell you, it feels good.
But that doesn’t mean aging is smooth sailing. Some moments I feel blue - kicking myself when I’m down because I should be less frivolous that this, more feminist. I know lots of women who feel the same. Some have decided to slow down the process with anti-aging interventions. It’s hard to talk about this without seeming judgy, but I’m going to try.
I’ve decided that anti-aging interventions aren’t right for me. Feminism is like any other social justice mahi: you have to focus on contributing the things you can, and not beat yourself up for the things you can’t. But I reckon we need someone to be the baseline, with her everyday hair and face and body, otherwise we’re all gonna feel more stink than we need to. With my newfound brazenness, I don’t mind being the baseline. That’s the thing I can contribute. If you need to do you differently, and you’re not feeling so great about getting older, well, we’re both women being awesome in our different ways, and I’ve still got your back.
I’m realistic: I’ll continue to have moments of feeling bad about aging. I figure I’ll take a deep breath and ask myself what it is I value about myself - and what other people value about me. I’ll remember, I hope, that my hair’s not top of anyone’s list.
I’ve already decided how I’ll spend my fiftieth birthday next year. I’ll do twenty press-ups on my toes, and then eat a really big bit of cheesecake. I will do both these things because I can. I’ve got a thing about cheesecake, but I’ve got a special thing about press-ups. Let me tell you why.
As a younger woman, when I was physically closer to what we’re told a woman is meant to be, I never quite figured out how to inhabit myself. I’d say ‘yes’ when I really wanted to say ‘no’. I would take up as little space as I could, apologising for the inconvenience of my being here, there, or anywhere at all. I managed, somehow, to be knocked over even in non-contact sports. I worried at first my young body was too thin; and then the moment I hit adulthood, I felt like I was never thin enough. If my identity was tied to my fertility, it was also, somehow, tied to my frailty, my conformity.
In my early forties, about the time I went into perimenopause, I took up weights class. I’d keep walking past the gym and hearing the music, the whooping and cheering; women of all ages and sizes spilling out afterwards, sweaty and happy. I was curious - even though I’d grown up hearing that muscular women are masculine, ugly, and worse still, probably gay. I gave weights a go. At first, and for a long time after, I was beyond useless. Lifting nothing at all made perspiration run through my still thick, frequently dyed hair.
But I figured out that doing with my body what I bloody well liked, no matter what anyone thought, felt like nothing I’d felt before. I stuck at it. Nearly ten years on, in gym class, I smash out whole series of press-ups on my toes - and while I pretend I’m modest about it, on the inside, I’m actually insufferable.
This is middle-aged me: grey hair, a grimace, grinding out the reps, no ****s to give and inhabiting myself.
At the hairdresser’s today, I made a spontaneous purchase. The thing about being fully grey is you can use a special conditioner to add colours to your hair - and not the sensible dyes I got when I was younger, but batshit, joyful, temporary colours, yellow and purple and green and blue.
The colour I chose is coral. Some will be aghast, thinking I’m brazen and nutty. But everyone else who knows and loves me has worked that out long since.
[Imagine description: Here I am, standing by my bookcase. On the right, above my shoulder, there’s a garden gnome with a sign that says ‘LOL’. My older son gave it to me one Christmas to annoy me. Above my other shoulder is a souvenir sunhat from Pope John Paul II’s 1986 visit to Aotearoa. I stole this, although not from the Pope himself.]
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