“Good Morning!” He Said Smiling. "WTF?" I Thought.

July 2018

I was crossing a parking lot a couple months ago and felt a sensation I used to feel multiple times a day but hadn’t felt in a good long time – a man I didn’t know was looking at me. As I walked toward Peet’s Coffee I felt his gaze, and as we were about to pass I looked directly at him. “Good morning,” he said with a big smile. “Good morning!” I said, smiling back.

What the heck was that? I wondered. For several years I’ve been virtually immune to being noticed by men in the world. Men no longer approach, flirt, smile, jockey, admire, or even catcall (with the exception of the occasional down-and-outer on the street offering “Ain’t you fine!”)

The year I was turning 50 I was in an interesting conversation in the American Airlines lounge at Logan International Airport with a man about a decade younger than I, a tech guy flying to Japan. I was newly out of my marriage and carrying roses that had been sent to me by a new suitor. The stranger’s and my flights were delayed and the we began to talk. The flowers led us to talk about relationships new and old and I was cocky and candid. Through the conversation, I am sure I conveyed a belief that being single again would be just like it had been for me in my 30s. Couldn’t I, right at that moment, name at least 3 other men, aside from the flower-sender, who were interested in me? I believed at that moment (admittedly flush with the attention of a new beau) that my post-marriage life would be similar to what it had been pre-marriage; that men would clamor to woo me, that there would be a similar “parade of men” as I had dubbed it in my early 30s.

I think back on this conversation because that man was a kind of sage. He told me quite simply and directly that no matter how desirable a woman might have been in her youth that it would not be the same after 50. I literally scoffed at him; he didn’t know ME! He didn’t know how compelling I had been to my male peers since I was a tiny girl! I can remember boys fighting to be in line behind me in the 1^st grade. “She’s my girl!” Tim said, shoving Ted out of the way. (That Tim told me at our 20^th high school reunion, “I can picture you in your bright green dress on the 1^st day of 1^st grade!”)

The matter-of-fact prediction by the man in the Boston airport went so against my life experience and my sense of myself I dismissed it outright. “What a quaint prediction,” I thought.

There is an absolute power in being a beautiful woman, and if it descends on you when you are young, it becomes part of who you are. It is reinforced every day by the people around you and the world at large, and it directly informs how you see yourself, the way you move through space, the way you interact with people. These things are only partly conscious – they are utterly baked into the person you are.

And then, menopause.

For decades I thought the positive attention I got was because I was so unique and special! I can clearly see now that a big part of it was simply youth and beauty. What a powerful combo that was! I am being clear-eyed here – I recognize that I retain charisma and brightness too – but my former allure, powerfully bolstered by a youth/beauty overlay have receded. One has to recalibrate. One settles into the new (more anonymous) normal. One marvels at the knowing words of an airport stranger.

In the 7+ years since my husband and I split I have met dozens and dozens of men via online dating sites, but almost none in my day-to-day life. This is the way it is and I now accept it. (Men no longer approach, flirt, smile, jockey, admire, or even catcall.) But also, in the 7+ years since my husband and I split, my hair has been dyed.

On another recent occasion, headed to get a latte, a man sitting on a bench outside the café watched me and smiled and said hello. Another man recently held the door for me, another smiled, another started a conversation as we awaited our coffee drinks. (Getting morning coffee is apparently the new pick up scene for midlifers?!) In recent months this has happened several times – more times than it has in years. And my is hair bright white now.

So here’s what I have been wondering: Is the new silver hair so dazzling and compelling that it is drawing men to watch and speak to me, or am I exuding more confidence and charisma as I grow out my gray hair, feeling more authentic and “myself”, which is drawing men to watch and speak to me?

Whatever it is, it’s the last thing I expected.

Hair Decisions, Up and Down

With Nana in early 2001. 

In August 2006, in a dingy motel in Rockford, Illinois, I decided to dye my  hair to cover the gray. In the gray-green light of the motel bathroom, I looked wan and sad in the mirror. I was sad – my siblings and parents and I had arrived the day before for my Nana’s funeral. My mother’s family is large and all seven siblings had gathered, plus spouses and many of my cousins. At short notice there were few rooms to be had so we were stuck with the unfortunate accommodations.

My Nana, Ruby Arizona Stevens, was born on Sand Mountain, Alabama in 1916. In 1961, she turned 45 just nine days before I was born. In October 2006, two months after her death, she would have turned 90, and nine days after that I would turn 45. The sweet synchronicity of this was only then dawning on me. I was exactly half Nana’s age; only halfway through my life. My Nana had led a full life as a spirited woman, a scrappy, smart, spunky gal. “I am only halfway done,” I thought. Looking at myself in the mirror, my graying hair looked dim and dull under the neon lights. “I have plenty of years to be gray.” Right then and there I decided I would dye it.

I called my husband back in San Francisco and told him “I’m going to dye my hair!” He immediately said, “You’re going to look suburban!”

I responded: “Nadia who belly dances – dyes her hair! Theresa, next door, with all the tattoos – dyes her hair!” I was trying to explain that virtually every woman between the ages of 40-65, even the hippest women we knew, was dying her hair. (Turns out I was wrong about Nadia who dyed her hair for fun, not gray coverage in the 90s, but my misunderstanding nonetheless helped make my point.)

I used to think about elite swimmers who in certain decades had to decide for themselves whether to take performance-enhancing drugs which were against both the rules and the distinction of elite competition or not to take performance-enhancing drugs and likely lose every race. What a lousy and unfair choice I thought. Hair-dying felt that way to me too. I thought if every woman my age is dying her hair and I don’t, I will automatically look like the oldest woman in the room. That doesn’t feel fair! I didn’t want to disappear, or not “rank.” This had been an existential conundrum for me as I had always been pretty self-accepting, or at least always strove to be.

My vanity had typically taken a back seat to other pursuits. Not that I wasn’t vain, but I consciously tried to overrule it, and when I couldn’t do that then I at least tried to hide it. I didn’t want to be caught looking at myself in a store window as I walked down the sidewalk, or putting on lipstick in a women’s restroom – I wasn’t that type of woman! I was carefree and oblivious or immune to beauty standards!

There were certain grooming practices I eschewed in the name of feminism or an anti-beauty stance. When I was 18, my boyfriend, Neal – my first serious and important boyfriend – told me someone he knew bleached the hair on her legs instead of shaving and that he liked how the sun glistened on her leg hairs. I had never heard of such a thing, but the idea, and his appreciation of it appealed to me. I began to bleach my leg hairs and did so for some time.

This is the actual brand I used in 1980!!

When I arrived at my off-campus dorm room at California State University, Chico in 1984, my roommate Kristi had already set up her side of the room. A poster with three kittens under a baby blue blanket hung over her bed, a makeup mirror sat on her desk and her top desk drawer, I later found out, was full of makeup and beauty products. I unpacked my art and school supplies into my drawers and, as the leg hairs were overdue, I swung them up on the desk and was smearing bleaching cream on them when Kristi walked in with Laurie, her high school friend who would become my best friend in college. “When I first met you,” she later told me, “you were dying your leg hairs!”

In addition to getting a task done (bleaching the leg hairs) I was quite conscious of my desire to differentiate myself, especially from the hyper-feminine trappings of my new soon to be revealed roommate. I didn’t know I would be caught in the act – mid smear! - but it ultimately made a lasting impression. I admit this very pointed “I will not shave my legs” effort was posturing. Admitting this and thinking about it, my leg hair bleach and Kristi’s set of perfume bottles were similar. I suppose all beauty and anti-beauty efforts are acts of posturing; by definition to “behave in a way that is intended to impress or mislead others.”

As American women, we have more agency than most women around the world to decide the version of who we want to present to the world. But we also have to contend with media and societal pressures all around us. The problem with “choice” in a culture that projects specific beauty ideals at us 24 hours a day, is it can be difficult to discern which decisions are truly our own and which have been directly influenced by advertisers, celebrities, cultural norms, trends, and other pressures. Take the Brazilian waxing trend which removes all pubic hair and is especially common among women 30 and under. That’s an arbitrary beauty trend if ever there were one. If we’re really paying attention, it is easy to see that beauty ideals are both trends and arbitrary! The 70s and 80s were a much hairier time!

So, I flew home from Nana’s funeral and dyed my hair. At first, I left a streak of white running down the right side of my face (the same streak I let grow back as my first step of bringing back the gray) and later dyeing the whole thing. Did it have the intended consequence I wanted? Did I look younger? More beautiful? Did it shave off 10 years of age more easily than if I had become a gym frequenter? Did I “impress or mislead others”? Did I look good? Did I look like myself? Did I dye it longer than I should have? Not long enough? Did the dyed hair help me get jobs, get dates?

It’s all an experiment anyway – whether to participate in beauty regimens and to what degree, how we develop a personal style and how it evolves over time. Sometimes we go with the trends and sometimes we don’t and that’s ultimately up to each of us to decide. Which trends are you riding right now? And which ones are you bucking? Whether trendy or not, I hope your choices add up to absolutely you.

Marblehead June 2018

At 6-1/2months of growth - a shorter haircut exposes underlayers of gray in a crazy marbled effect. I was so surprised when my hairdresser turned my chair around and showed me the back! "Wow!"

    

Adventures of a Middle-Aged Woman on a College Campus or How To Create a Farcical Scene in a Natatorium

I stepped out of the shower wrapped in the large white towel I had checked out at the front desk, my wet bathing suit in hand. On automatic, I turned to the left toward the small wall-mounted machine that spins the excess water out of bathing suits. “Wait, it’s not there,” I thought, surprised, standing between the rows of showers. “Am I turned around?”

The shiny new Mashouf Wellness Center opened last August at San Francisco State University, just a few buildings away from where I work. I have been swimming a couple times a week since December, usually about 30 minutes, then taking a few minutes in the jacuzzi before showering. Returning to the locker room from the natatorium, you walk through a short, tiled hallway that jogs once and opens into a section lined by five or six shower stalls on each side. The design probably assumes people will go directly into the showers when coming from the pool, but my routine is to go to my locker to get shampoo, conditioner, and towel before showering, dripping all the way.

This day, my routine was different. After my swim, I was headed directly to get a haircut so wasn’t going to wash my hair at the gym. I skipped the jacuzzi too so my approach to the row of doors on one end of the natatorium – offices, locker rooms, all gender bathroom – was the opposite of my usual path. I opened the door to the locker room from the natatorium, followed the short hallway and went right into a shower stall. I pulled the white plastic curtain closed and took off my bathing suit. 

But now, following my shower, ready to go get dressed, I was confused that the bathing suit spinner was not where it normally was. I stood there for 30 seconds looking up and down the room trying to make sense of its displacement without the obvious explanation occurring to me.

It was there I was standing when a young man coming from the pool rounded the corner into the shower section where I stood. He froze when he saw me, and I froze too.

“Am I in the wrong one, or are you?” I asked, wide-eyed and almost shouting. Not responding, the young man turned and ran back toward the door to the natatorium and I took off running after him, towel around me, wagging my dripping bathing suit as I went. I burst back through the door onto the pool deck, where the student, reassured by the signs on the doors, said simply “this is the men’s”, and went back in.

OH MY GOD.

What if I had initially just walked all the way into the locker room as I normally did – and it was the men’s room? What if I had been naked in the shower and heard male voices outside – how would I have gracefully gotten out of there? What if I had stepped out of the shower to find a young man with a towel around his waist – or less?! Each was such a funny and crazy scenario.

I scurried into the women’s locker room and exclaimed to two young women chatting as they dressed, “I just took a shower in the men’s room!” They smiled politely, looking at me with the impatient look of young people wondering why a towel-clad stranger is suddenly speaking to them. It was not a satisfactory interaction.

Still, laughing about the absurdity of my error (and the future comic possibilities of both relating and acting the story out later on), I wondered if the lifeguards sitting across the room had witnessed the farcical tableau. A young Chinese man walks into the men’s locker room and moments later bursts back through the door into the natatorium, followed by a middle aged Caucasian woman in a towel, wet hair slicked to her head, a limp bathing suit flapping in one hand. They pause briefly together before he steps back into the men’s room and she prances quickly on bare feet disappearing into the women’s room. “Did you see that?” one asks the other. “Yes,” the other responds, and they turn their eyes back to the handful of lap swimmers in the pool. Or maybe now when I go to swim, one lifeguard elbows the other and nods knowingly in my direction. 

More likely I am the only one who took particular note of the adventure. Well, me and the young man. I hope he too has related it and acted it out for laughs!

Silver and Gold!

Sitting in the sun the other day, my friend Lisa exclaimed, “your hair is silver and gold!” This photo, taken a few days later, is just shy of the six-month mark of growing it out.

May 2018

Someone recently told me I had to look up the Instagram account Grombre. An “ombré” is two-toned hair color and if half of it is gray it’s a grombre! Check out the glorious sisterhood of women letting the gray come in! https://www.instagram.com/grombre

Put The Book Back - Navigating Menopause

Several years ago I stepped out of the library in San Francisco’s Mission District with three menopause books in my hands and ran right into one of the cute PTA dads from my son’s elementary school. 

“Hi!” he said. 

“Hi!” I said, stopping to talk while immediately wondering how to deflect the inevitable question “what books did you get?” 

Fortunately, he didn't ask that question and either missed or ignored my nervous juggling of the books as I tried to mask titles, spines, and glaring back cover lines announcing “Hot Flashes and Night Sweats!” 

Menopause is a topic and an experience that takes some getting used to and it is not something you want to broadcast to one of the cute PTA dads. Whether he noticed the books or not I don’t know, but I took solace in remembering that he, his wife, and I were all born in the same year, 1961. Menopause was likely a topic and an experience he was becoming familiar with.

The internal panic I felt during that awkward masking-a-secret-while-talking-to-a-cute-guy conversation was only surpassed by one other in memory – a time when a super cute boy entered my open dorm room right after I had farted. I was sitting at my desk while on exchange at the University of Delaware looking at a photo album when he came through the door. As he approached me to look over my shoulder at the album I whipped those large cardboard pages back and forth in hopes of dissipating the gaseous hangover cloud we were now both in the center of. (sigh)

Sometimes your complicated humanness is going to seep out in any number of ways, and life goes on – even if a 35-year old memory can still cause a cringe.

When menopause symptoms first begin, you don’t really know that that’s what’s happening, especially as some of them begin earlier than you might think. What is this? Is this...? How is this whole thing going to go down?

One of the books I checked out of the library had a chirpy, humorous tone as it outlined the litany of things one could experience: hot flashes, mood swings, fatigue, hair loss, sleep disorders, decreased sex drive, lack of concentration, weight gain, dizziness, incontinence, bloating, anxiety, brittle nails, irritability, memory lapses, headaches, panic disorders, dry itchy skin, dry vagina, vaginal atrophy, digestive issues, constipation, and something called “electric shock sensation,” (among other things.) I was really not prepared for the barrage of every single thing that could happen, and especially not ready for the perky tone of that one book. I might lose my ability to concentrate, AND leak in my pants while working for my new much younger male boss! Ha ha! My vagina could dry up, but it may little matter with my new decreased sex drive! Ho Ho!

I told my friend, Donna about the “panic disorders” and “mood swings” being brought on by reading the first few chapters of the “funny” menopause book and she wisely and simply said, “take the book back.”

The reality is that menopause (like everything else) is unique to each woman. We won’t get every possible symptom so why focus or fret on what could happen? More importantly, what will happen will happen regardless of the books we read, and as they do, you just need to accept or alleviate as best you can. (I chose hormone replacement with a low estrogen patch which has helped considerably with the main symptoms I experienced: hot flashes, dry itchy skin, and short-term memory loss. As for the va-jay-jay, one word: Vagifem, an utter godsend first mentioned to me by a woman older than I. Every woman over 50 ought to know about this option just in case.)

Here’s something as unexpected as learning of the litany of possible symptoms: menopause can free a woman in a way she has never known, with age and experience besting the freedoms we may have had in our 20s. Estrogen is a hormone which, in part, drives us to keep the peace at home and at work. Estrogen does some wonderful things, but also participated in fueling the good girl, the helper, the supporter.  One of the (more serious) menopause books I read said that when your estrogen drops, you may find yourself saying "make your own god damned sandwich!” At its best, menopause can be a time for a woman to find herself, figure out what she likes, wants, needs. It can be a time to pursue long-buried dreams or interests, to learn how to paint or skydive or brew beer; to travel or start a business or leave an unhealthy relationship. Menopause can provide an opportunity for a new start and a new perspective.

Imagine running into someone as you come from the library with a stack of books under your arm and being asked what you checked out. Imagine showing them books about learning to brew beer or starting a new business or reading up on Japan in preparation for a trip there. There are so many plans to make when you’re awake in the middle of the night!

Growing Out Gray Hair, How To #4 – Growing a Silver Stripe or Two

In my Feb 17 post I wrote about the method of dying only your part while letting gray come in underneath. I gave that a try but when I abandoned the effort and dyed my hair again, I decided to let one small patch of silver come in as a test, and a nod to my natural color. That patch was not the top most hair next to my face, but was the next layer down and mostly hidden from view. The streak of silver became a bit of a secret, exposed sometimes depending how my hair fell, or showing when I brushed my hand through my hair or pulled my hair back in a clip. 

Using Silver Stripes To Facilitate Growing In The Gray

I dyed my roots every two to three weeks and would exclude the secret patch of white hair and, over time, a few of its neighboring hairs so the patch of gray got incrementally larger. Finally,  in a step toward going all gray, I changed my part to fall right in the middle of those silver hairs and pulled half of them over to the other side of my face. At that point the silver patch was divided in two with strands exposed on both sides of my face. 

Growing the gray streak, increasing the number of hairs in the streak, and then switching my part so silver was exposed on both sides of my face were all steps toward letting all of the gray come in. I was getting used to it, and so were the people in my life.


 

These three pictures were taken the same night in 2016. I grew in a silver stripe just under the top hair on the right side of my face and it showed or didn't show based on how my hair fell naturally or was pulled behind my ear.

I mention this option - growing in a streak of gray - both because the streak was kind of cool, but also because having those silver streaks on either side of my face became an unexpected tool when I started growing out the gray in earnest.  Since my part was increasingly white and stood out, I could (and can) just pull the full length silver hair near my face up over my head and hold it with a clip, and the silver stripes help mask the growing strip of gray down the middle of my head.  In the early months especially, this was a great trick to minimize the skunk stripe. 

 

In the first few weeks - November 2017