Your hair is not sun tea

I’m 38 – in my prime, no? But boy have I have been feeling old lately. Partly it’s my job. I have been doing a stint at the local community college, where I share a bathroom with the women’s volleyball league, all toned and jocular in their knee-highs and those – what are those little stretch shorts that only cover the butt?.

And partly it’s my hair, which has been going grey in great big Morticia Adams streaks for a few years. I like the streaks – I do. They’re my earthy mama cred – all long and wavy and kinda wiry. But when they started to get mousy, I thought I’d dye it. Not out of shame, you understand. Just for the experience.

I have never once died my hair. One time, when my sister was working at a salon, she pilfered some blue color gel and I put it in my hair and then tried to set the color by sunbathing because I didn’t have a hair dryer. When I confided this transgression to my hairdresser (I have sometimes gone to real hair salons), they all had a big laugh, saying “Your hair is not sun tea, honey.”

So, my first mistake is not going to a hair salon. I’m just too busy. I went to one of those places where you don’t have to have an appointment. And out came gushing all this baggage about my twisted relationship with cosmetics. I want to dye my hair, but I don’t want to cover up the grey, just some, y’know, drama. So the lady ends up convincing me that I really want highlights. So I don’t know if this is what it’s supposed to look like, but now all my grey is platinum white and lots of my hair that wasn’t grey before is this sickly old lady yellow.

Oh, I am hag-a-riffic.