Going Grey

Going Grey by Anne Kreamer seems to be a Something About My Neck/Nora Ephram wanna be. Kreamer's book doesn't cut it. Ephram's book made me laugh out loud and drew me into her psche. Though drawn out, the points in Kreamer's book rang true.

Going Grey chronicles the choice to stop dying hair and become ones authentic self. Been there done that. The author is surprised to learn through a myriad of surveys that others found women that look their age and not faking it more attractive. I appreciated the book jacket: "Anne Kremer considered herself an impossibly youthful forty-nine until a casual glance at a family photograph stopped her in her tracks. There she was behind carefully chosen clothes, meticulously dyed hair and several rounds of botox - looking (horror or horrors) exactly forty-nine."

Something special happens when you turn fifty. For me at least, it was the very first time besides when I was sixteen and got my drivers license, that I actually thought about my age. I felt good about the first fifty and thought about the next fifty. I also observed my urban life... women with under-aged hairstyles, fake nails, and eek few forty-year-olds that didn't have any business wearing anything that exposed their tummies.

True confession: somehow in my forties I started dying my hair. As I approached fifty, I thought, wait a minute "why am I doing this?" How to stop without having a frumpy striped hairline?

I said "tawanda" and let my hair grow out a little and found a good hairdresser. I had my hair cut down to a half inch. My husband loved it. At work someone told me I looked like I owned an art gallery (my secret alter ego). I got more comments on the street from men and women then since my twenties. My twenty-something son liked it. My late-teen aged daughter said I looked like a cancer patient. My five year old said I looked like a boy.

I felt bolder. I felt beautiful. I felt wise. I felt fifty. I felt like me.