Gracefully

It's easy for me to see the loveliness of God's design at the beginning of the lifespan. Those patches of hair at a newborn's temples, the ones that fade away mysteriously within a couple of weeks? I love those. The variations in baby coiffures, the way that some of them are born with full heads of hair and some stay bald for a good long while? I love those. Three of my kids lost all the hair on the tops of their heads at 26 days old -- like, whoosh, scissors-free tonsure on day 27. Weird, right? But after the first one it also felt to me like an identity badge: here I am, bald and vulnerable and entirely yours.

I have a harder time seeing the loveliness of God's design further on. It's the same idea, right? Some of us saw our first gray hair at 25; some of us are catching up more slowly. Some of us (okay, this one is me) have, like, the Eyebrows of Dorian Gray. I don't have much gray hair on my scalp, but my eyebrows bespeak the hard-living years of my youth. Or something like that. I believe that gray hair can be a crown of glory but maybe, just possibly, my coronation could take place a little further in the future.

One of my friends messaged me tonight, feeling that she ought to accept the gray gracefully but also not feeling at all graceful about it. And you know, there's something to be said for pushing back against the cultural message that gray hair means it's time for a woman to be put out to pasture, but also we need to tackle that message on fronts that transcend the tonsorial. Like, perhaps the beast of burden imagery is a bigger problem than the chemicals or the vanity or the support of the beauty industry. Perhaps the core issue is a culture that equates aging men with bottles of wine (they improve with age), and aging women with cartons of milk. (After their sell-by dates they get lumpy and sour.)

"I support you in dyeing or graying!" is what I told my friend, and I guess I wanted to tell you that too. We live in a time and place where we're mostly expected to modify our bodies to meet a cultural standard: trim our split ends, depilate our pits, don our anti-gravity undergarments when we go out in public. (Some people just call them bras but it's more fun if you can shout TO INFINITY AND BEYOND when you get dressed in the morning.) There's no intrinsic virtue in conforming to or rejecting any of those standards; the same is true for dyeing and graying.

But here is the thing I wish for you, my friends: I wish that you would take a deep breath and think back to when you held a sleeping baby dear to you and admired the whorl of hair at the crown of her head. Remember the rush of affection you felt as you looked at your own particular baby's very particular hair? I think that God our Father looks at us with the same affection as we trudge through our 30s and 40s and 50s-- viewing the sprinkling of gray at your temples, and the silver strands highlighting my pal Veronica's dark curls -- and also my Dorian Gray Eyebrows -- with tender love and with his everlasting appreciation of variety.