The Beauty of Gray

I found my first gray hair on Saturday, one month after my 30th birthday. It seemed a bit late, actually, like a friend showing up for happy hour just in time for last call. “Where have you been?” I wondered. After all, I’ve been stressed out for years.

I would be a lot more concerned if I didn’t have any signs of aging after practicing law for five years and being a mom to a sleep-avoiding firecracker for two years. I know that it’s all relative, that everyone is busy and stressed, that we all worry about our children, and I am no different.

I’m sure there is some bio-chemical process that pulls pigment out of hair. I don’t really want to know the scientific answer about how that works. I’m more interested in the mythical explanation. That, at some point, my heart pulled color and light in from wherever I could find it, to keep me going and quiet the fears that come with having responsibility for another human being’s health and heart and all that it means to create an environment for a pure consciousness to grow, even for a short time.

Holding the gray hair in the light, I can almost see the layers, like sedimentary rock, that have taken the color from the hair. There are stacked images fading to gray: moving to a new city for the fourth time, countless deadlines, a water-filled basement the night before my husband’s thesis was due, blood in the sink from a vomiting 5-month-old, a phone call that a family member’s life was in danger, and so on.

But all of our lives are filled with challenges, some far greater than anything I have faced. In some ways, becoming a mom has exacerbated those challenges for me, and in others, it has made it easier to cope. My child doesn’t have time for my drama. I have to keep moving forward. She constantly puts everything in perspective – her own perspective – which allows me to get out of my head.

My daughter has never cared much for sleeping. The pediatrician, who resembles the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies, jokes, “it’s because she’s a genius! Yes, Sister! Tell them!” raising his hand up to her head impersonating an evangelist and laughing. He’s funny, and he may be right, but I’m so sleep deprived at this point that it’s all funhouse mirrors and slap happy goof-dom by the time we make it to the next milestone well-baby visit that I keep forgetting to ask him when she will sleep.

I know inherently that I am to blame for my sleep dep because, on those rare instances when she is sleeping, I’m not, and when she wakes up in the night, I secretly want to help her go back to sleep so that I can hold her and watch her in the blue light of her room when the house is completely still, and her hand opens and closes in sleepy slow motion over the Gund tag on her bear like a starfish underwater. It’s one of the few things that doesn’t change as she grows.

I will continue to color treat my hair and caffeinate to stay awake through the day. But I am glad that my body has, at the very least, responded by saying, “Here it is. Here’s proof that you have gone through it and survived and hopefully learned something.”