I finally stopped coloring my hair blond after 20 years, and I've never felt closer to the women in my family
A year ago, I stood in the bathroom studying my hair. The bleach-blond ends had given way to dark roots that grew out during lockdown. I'd always hated my roots. Yet as I observed myself in the morning light, my disapproval turned to curiosity: What if I grew the highlights out completely? I had no idea what I would look like, and I felt like finding out.
I'd highlighted my hair since college, when my blond darkened into a shade that didn't jive with who I expected to see when I looked in the mirror. Besides the familiarity, being blond also carried cultural weight. As a kid I absorbed tropes like "blond bombshell" and "blondes have more fun," subconsciously buying into the idea that blond is better. In my twenties, when a friend tried to dissuade me from highlights — "They're putting chemicals on your head!" she exclaimed — I countered that my natural hair resembled dirty dishwater or the Southwestern sky during a dust devil.
And so went the last 20 years. Then came COVID-19. At first, I avoided the salon out of caution. But then I let my makeup and blow dryer gather dust and enjoyed taking Zoom calls in yoga pants, an implicit rejection of all the things I did in order to perform the public version of myself. I wondered: Would I feel more or less like me if I embraced my natural hair color? And what color was it, anyway?
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During a dip in case counts, I donned two masks and had a stylist darken the blond half of my hair to match my natural color, which turned out to be light brown with glints of cinnamon. When the stylist handed me the mirror, the green-eyed brunette looking back at me in the glass brought to mind my mother when she was my age, before she went gray. The resemblance took my breath away.
I derived solace from this shared, inherited hair color
I missed my mom terribly. My son was five and my daughter one when the pandemic halted Mom's monthly visits to see our family in Denver. I did my best to show her my daughter's toddler steps and my son's kindergarten art from afar, via Zoom and mailed envelopes to her Albuquerque home, but it felt woefully insufficient.
As we anticipated vaccines, we planned a spring visit. But in January, Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. Instead of hugging her grandchildren, she would be undergoing a partial mastectomy and possibly radiation. Her partner wasn't yet vaccinated, so I postponed plans to make the drive. I'd never felt so far away, and I envied my older sister for living nearby.
"What do you need from me?" I asked Mom one night. "I need you to send me strength," she said. She had always been my rock, and now, I needed to be hers.
One winter evening, I texted with my mom and sister about Mom's second Moderna dose and looming cancer surgery. Mom sent us two photos as a welcome distraction. Look what I found! she typed. The first picture was the three of us in 1979. My mom wore her long, pecan-colored hair in a bun and my 10-year-old sister held me, a towheaded toddler. Looking at their brown hair in the photo, I felt closer to them because of my new look. Frivolous? Maybe, but it was true.
The second photo Mom sent was of her parents in the 1940s. My grandmother Videlle's stylishly coiffed hair was a similar color as ours but slightly darker. The daughter of homesteaders and the son of coal miners, she and my grandfather looked so happy and hopeful.
I soon found myself poring over old photos
I studied my female forebears in the dining room, glancing at the mirror on the wall and holding pictures to my face to judge the resemblance. As I did, my eye fell on my wedding band. The diamond set in a gold art deco square belonged to my great-grandmother. I pulled out my favorite photo of her.
In the sepia-toned image from a 1918 Armistice Day celebration in Kansas, Blanche stands on a wagon holding an American flag. Her dark hair is tucked into a military cap. The image was faded, but I could make out the resolute set of her jaw. Sometime that year, maybe even at that parade, she got the Spanish flu, which progressed into encephalitis that kept her in bed for months and nearly killed her. The doctors didn't think she would survive, but she eventually recovered — minus a lifelong tremor — and went on to raise her daughter and help raise my mom.
Surrounded by four generations of pictures in my dining room, I was moved by my ancestors' resilience. My great grandmother survived the "Great Influenza," the Great Depression and two World Wars. A Christian Scientist who attributed her flu recovery to the healing power of prayer, she hand-sewed clothes for my mother, cooked a mean roast and lived into her nineties.
In the years after that ebullient newlywed photo of my grandparents was taken, Videlle discovered he was having an affair. She had to hire a private investigator to document the adultery in order to get a divorce, and afterwards, worked factory jobs to support my mom and aunt. Mom says she doesn't recall her mother being bitter. In my memories, my grandmother is gentle and kind, with the enthusiasm for life that stuck with her until she died peacefully at home at 98.
Given this heritage of tenacity, it's not surprising that Mom became the first person in her family to attend college, earned a doctorate while raising kids in the 1970s and continues to work as a clinical psychologist at 79. Before her cancer surgery in February, Mom's biggest concern was her trauma patients. When I suggested she refer some out to lighten her load, she guffawed. "Are you kidding me? Do you know what these people have gone through?" She took a week off for surgery, then resumed Zoom therapy sessions from the couch with a drain under her left arm. Her one concession was to decline new patients.
Like the brunette hair color, resilience is my inheritance
Devastated that I couldn't be with her, I took consolation in our shared inherited hair color, which I admired in the rearview mirror as I talked to her on the phone while dropping my kids at daycare. As I listened to Mom's updates on wound care, I imagined my grandmother and great-grandmother, long dead, cheering us on.
"The mornings are really tough," Mom told me one morning. "But I keep finding such wonderful things – like this new pain management recording I listened to last night." That acknowledgment of hardship, followed by the celebration of hope and salves, runs through our lineage like a strand of hair in a long braid. And when I forget, Mom reminds me.
I complained to her one snowy afternoon about the relentless monotony of pandemic parenting, remote work, and the battle to keep the dirty dishes at bay. Even though she was the one recovering from cancer surgery, she gave me a pep talk. "The forties are hard," she said. "Work, kids, marriage, hormones, everything's happening and you're doing it in a pandemic. I don't know anyone who's having the time of their life right now, honey, but we'll get through it."
Mom reminded me that resilience is my inheritance. It's just as much a part of me as that persistent brunette gene is.
As I look forward to a post-vaccination trip to Albuquerque to see Mom, I use a series of talismans to remind me of where I came from and what that makes possible. I keep my great-grandmother's 1918 photo on my desk, play with her ring while I think, and wear my grandmother's opal around my neck.
My brown-haired, blue-eyed two-year-old daughter picks up a book, and I say, "Grandma sent you that one." As my toddler climbs into my lap for the story, I'm determined to set the example of resilience for her and her brother that our forebears set for me. I think: Their stories are your stories now, too. Their strength is yours to carry forward.
Megan Feldman Bettencourt is the author of Triumph of the Heart: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World. Her writing has appeared in publications including Psychology Today, Salon, Harper's BAZAAR, Glamour, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others.