Am I Too Young for Grey Hair?

I'm typing this blog post while wearing my bathrobe, with my now shoulder length, damp hair piled on top of my head and wrapped in an old towel after having been thoroughly doused with "Garnier Nutrisse Medium Reddish Brown #37." The pungent smell of the chemicals mixed with shower steam clings to me, and after all these years of dying my hair just about every month (or more), I find the peculiar odor strangely comforting.

I can't take the towel off or rinse my hair out for another 29 minutes if I want to be sure that the dye does its job properly. The instructions on the box say that I only have to let the drugstore hair concoction permeate my follicles for 10 minutes, but I know better; now that I'm in my 40s, it takes double that time to be sure I've thoroughly doused the rogue gray hairs that have now started to appear on my head. And quite frankly, now that the gray strands are starting to pop up regularly, I've realized that I'd do almost anything to get rid of them.

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I've been compulsively dying my hair since I was a teenager - long before covering up emerging gray was part of the reason. While I've never gotten a tattoo or any piercings beyond my single earlobe punch on each side, from about the age of 15, I've loved reinventing the way I look any time I feel like it with nothing more than an $8 box of hairdye.

Over the years, I've sported just about every haircolor on the spectrum, from Edie Sedgwick blonde to - for a brief period in college - Pink's pink. In the past decade, I've settled on a dark auburn that gives me a little punch of color without shocking the execs I run into in the elevators at work. I did go full on red for about 6 months back in 2005 - like, in your face, Christina Hendricks bombshell red - and I loved it, but achieving that kind of color cost me several hundred bucks and two trips to the salon (one to "strip" my natural medium brown color and the second to pour on the red firehose). While I'd like to go that red again at some point, I never seem to find myself inclined to spend the money when I can play around the edges of my hair color for only $8 a month and 30 minutes of bathrobe lounging time at home.

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But in the past few years - and particularly in the 18 months since my oldest child died, aging me beyond my actual years in all kinds of ways - my hair has begun the process of turning gray, meaning that the reason I am dying my hair is becoming less a positive expression of self and more of an attempt to hide something about my real self.

Now that I am regularly finding random gray hairs all over my head, if I wait too long between my home coloring sessions, I can see the gray creeping in at the roots and at my temples - not a lot yet, but more than I saw a year ago. The other day, for the first time, someone else mentioned the gray in my hair when my 20 months younger sister advised me that I'd better refresh my haircolor immediately because she could see the unwelcome color peeking through.

So why not just go with it? Why not accept that I am now a 40-something woman, and women of a certain age have some gray hair, and eventually, that gray hair becomes predominant until it eventually becomes white hair. Why in the world should it matter to me whether my hair is starting to turn gray? Do I think people are stupid and don't realize that the mother of a child who would be 20 if he'd lived, along with two other teenagers (as well as a 4 year old and a one year old) isn't as old as she is? And why do I even CARE whether people think I am old…or young…or somewhere in between?

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I've been pondering all of these questions lately - although I continue to do my pondering with nary a gray hair in obvious evidence on my head - and I can't really come up with any responses more thoughtful than an almost primal rejection of the idea that I would ever simply allow my hair to slowly turn gray right in front of the whole world's eyes. Every time I try to make myself imagine simply stopping with the coloring, and allowing the gray to come out of hiding, I simply cannot. Every fiber of my being rejects the notion of a version of me with hair the color of an old lady.

I keep wondering whether at some point, I will have an "aha" moment about this issue, like the one Anne Kreamer describes in an article she wrote for MORE Magazine about her decision to finally embrace the gray hair she'd been battling back. Kreamer writes:

"In the fall of 2004, a casual glance at a recent photograph - of me and my blonde 16-year-old daughter - changed my life. In that instant, I saw myself for what I truly was: a 48-year-old mother of this young woman, not her faintly hip older friend. It was like a kick in the solar plexus. All my years of careful artifice, attempting to conserve what I considered a youthful look, were ripped away. I saw a schlubby, middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too dark. I had never thought closely or critically about what the color of my hair was communicating to the world. It was simply what I had done for 25 years, and what I assumed looked good and right. But that snapshot - taken on a road trip with my daughter and two other friends my age - made me start thinking hard about who I was and who I wanted to be. Would I cling to a frozen-in-time vision of myself or make the transition into middle age with some candor? I decided at that instant to move toward authenticity - and, as the first step, to quit dyeing my hair."

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But while I find it fascinating to read about Kreamer's own breakthrough, resulting in a yearlong process of finally allowing her hair to go gray (with a little help from her colorist to get her there gracefully) - I don't find anything remotely appealing about following her example in bravery and self honesty.

Certainly, there are fabulous looking women with gray and white hair, but I simply don't encounter many of them - or any of them (actually, I know exactly one) - at the company where I work, or at the parties I attend with my husband, or in the car line at my children's schools. Really, I mostly only see these great looking women who have gone gray gracefully in the movies (Helen Mirren comes to mind) or in heavily styled MORE Magazine photo shoots. While my iconoclastic grandmother allowed herself to go gray far earlier than most women, and as a result looked older than she was until she really WAS that old, my mother is still a sunny blonde at age 66. My mother in law is the best going gray role model in my real life. She wears a steely gray pixie cut with great aplomb, and clearly couldn't give a damn what anyone else thinks. I wish I could be more like her instead of someone who apparently feels like she has to try to mask her true age behind a curtain of color.

But I do feel that way. Gray hair just seems like something for women far older than I am, and I don't want to "look old" because I don't want to BE old. And while I realize that I am simply deluding myself into believing I can somehow use hair color to trick Mother Nature into giving me more years before other, less pleasant parts of the aging process begin to plague me, I can't imagine letting go of that illusion.

Not yet, anyway.

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Katie Allison Granju is the married mother of five children, the youngest of whom was born June 27, 2010. She also also blogs at Mamapundit.com. She works full time in digital media with a large cable network.When she isn't washing someone's socks, she enjoys listening to powerpop and Americana, riding horses, engaging in political debate and drinking good beer. You can also follow her on Twitter and Facebook.