A Blonde By Any Other Color...

This weekend my hair changed color. Not by itself like the magic rainbow horse in Wizard of Oz, although wouldn't that be cool? I had my hair DID. First let me preface this by saying that I've had the same haircut for years. Medium length with long layers and blonde highlights to accentuate my natural dirty blonde-ish color.

I think I just woke up Saturday morning, looked in the mirror and had a new-mommy life crisis. The kind of life crises where you think, "Omg, I'm someone's mom. I'm someone's mom AND I'm required to feed that someone every three hours for the next eleven months AND I have a mortgage AND I've never been to India AND I'm one step closer to the end AND (as a final straw) I have REALLY BAD HIGHLIGHT GROWOUT!

So I got myself to the Salon faster than a baby can spit up on a newly washed shirt. But somewhere between me asking my hair dresser (that's a funny title because hair doesn't wear clothing!) to dye my hair back to it's original color and me dishing out way too much money, something went horribly wrong. Horribly BRUNETTE wrong.

I know I've been in denial about my hair color since I was six when a hair dresser chopped off the last of my bleach blonde baby hair. In first grade my best friend colored a picture of us together and I threw a hissy fit that she colored my hair light brown. "What is that?!" I yelled at her, "My hair is blonde, NOT brown!" Then in second grade when we were coloring self portraits, meany Matt Smith (who always scribbled on my desk) exclaimed to me that my hair was Dirty Dishwater Blonde. I ran up to the art teacher with tears in my eyes in search of a second opinion. According to my diplomatic Art Teacher, my hair was "golden blonde." Then after I graduated from college, I started highlighting my hair as a final act of denial.

To me, being blonde was just who I was as a person. It was as central to my identity as my running habit and my love for chocolate bars.

So when I asked my hair dresser to take me back to my natural color, I was finally accepting the fact that I am who I am. I was accepting that the almost 25 year old me is tied down to student loans, a house, a husband and a son. That I have never travelled the world or explored the jungle or solved a mystery (other than to find the location of missing house keys and work socks) or raided a lost arc in Egypt or flown an airplane. I never became fluent in a foreign language and I've never been on an adventure grander than my middle school trip to Space Camp.

While I was prepared to look reality in the face, I was not prepared to walk out of the salon as a 100% brunette. Either I was REALLY in denial about my hair color before or my hair dresser took come artistic liberties. I'm inclined to blame my hairdresser because she was calling me by the wrong name the entire time. *SIDE NOTE: You know how awkward it is when you don't correct someone the first time? It makes you look bad to correct them later and so they keep on calling you the wrong name for the rest of your life and you have to pretend that's your actual name?*

Anyway, I'm starting to get used to this new look and I'm almost starting to like it. I can't yet say the same for the new perspective on my identity.