Story for the Week
That’s right. I said it. I have never colored my hair.
In fairness, I haven’t ever felt that I had to. I inherited my dad’s genes related to gray hair, I guess. While I have a smattering of gray around my temples, it’s nothing that really stands out as far as I’m concerned. Oh, Corinne will point it out every chance she gets, but I’m not at a point where I feel like I have to color it. I don’t know that I ever will.
That doesn’t mean I have virgin hair. I was a teenager of the 1980s, when perms were all the rage, and I certainly had my fair share. But I got lucky that I didn’t completely destroy my hair in the process.
I remember one time when Dennis and I found a new hairdresser. His hair was on the dry side (as is Corinne’s), and he asked her what he should use to wash his hair. She pointed at me and said, “whatever she’s using.” Not gonna lie, that made me kind of happy.
In addition to the perms in the ’80s, I subjected my hair to blow dryers, curling irons, all the hot small appliances that damage hair. As I’ve gotten older, my hair is consistently in a pony tail. I haven’t used a blow dryer or a curling iron in a couple of decades. The last time I styled it on a daily basis was before Dennis and I got married in 2002 and I was going into an office every day.
I also don’t do all the things they recommend to keep your hair healthy. I don’t go for a trim every six to eight weeks. The last haircut I went for was the first in about four years. 😲 I brush it when it’s wet. I do not start from the bottom and work my way up. But I do always condition my hair. So I guess a combination of that and good hair genes made me very lucky in that respect.
Maybe I’m aging gracefully. Maybe I’m just aging lazily. 😂 I don’t plan to ever color my hair. I don’t wear make-up anymore. I buy clothes that provide comfort over style. I just want to spend my spare time doing the things I want to do as I get older.
And I hope I’m teaching Corinne that she should present herself to the world the way she wants to present herself. She wears make-up when she wants to for special occasions, but she understands that every day is not great for her skin. She wears her hair in a pony tail most of the time too, primarily because she has a lot of very curly hair.
By the time she reaches midlife, I want Corinne to already have learned the lessons that I spent decades figuring out. But I don’t want to disappear like the author of the book reviewed below. I just want to spend the second half of my life without the midlife mayhem she talks about.
Book Review
⭐⭐
2 Stars for Excuse Me While I Disappear: Tales of Midlife Mayhem by Laurie Notaro
255 pages
Publisher: Little A
Publication Date: November 1, 2022
Purchased on Amazon.
Publisher’s Description
Laurie Notaro has proved everyone wrong: she didn’t end up in rehab, prison, or cremated at a tender age. She just went gray. At past fifty, every hair’s root is a symbol of knowledge (she knows how to use a landline), experience (she rode in a car with no seat belts), and superpowers (a gray-haired lady can get away with anything).
Though navigating midlife is initially upsetting—the cracking noises coming from her new old body, receiving regular junk mail from mortuaries—Laurie accepts it. And then some. With unintentional abandon, she shoplifts a bag of russet potatoes. Heckles a rude driver from her beat-up Prius. And engages in epic trolling on Nextdoor.com. That, says Laurie, is the brilliance of growing older. With each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear.
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Laurie Notaro is a well-known author of humorous essays and novels, so when I came across a special promotion on Amazon for her 2022 release about growing older, I decided to give it a shot. As a Gen-Xer myself, I relate to a lot of the things Notaro writes about. I don’t relate, however, to most of her approach to aging.
The book began pretty well. I had high hopes. Notaro talks about the challenges of graying and having to color her hair increasingly more often. One day, she decides to embrace the gray and switch to her natural color. Once she takes the plunge, she realizes that being gray makes her “invisible,” that people stop paying attention to her because she’s “supposed to be so harmless and weak and afraid.”
Now I’m all for women aging gracefully and embracing the changes life throws at them. But when Notaro embraces her changes and accidentally leaves a store without paying for a bag of potatoes, she decides that being invisible will work to her advantage. She overloads a self-serve frozen yogurt without paying. She pockets (and then puts back) a pair of headphones at Best Buy. She does acknowledge that she’s not suggesting every woman of a certain age become a petty thief but also says “if you’re going to fail to notice my existence, I’m entitled to a rotisserie chicken every now and then.”
Notaro continues with chapters that feel a little like stand-up comedy routines. She talks about making older friends and starting a job where she has to suddenly learn office politics. She regales us with stories about colonoscopies and mammograms, weight-loss surgery and restless leg syndrome that makes it hard for her to sleep.
I could relate to many of the things she is experiencing as a 50-something post-menopausal woman. By the end, though, I didn’t want to relate to it at all. The further I got into the book, the more I felt like she isn’t enjoying life at all as she ages. She sounds more like a bitter old woman, complaining about people skateboarding on “her” sidewalk.
This one is a miss for me.
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