There it lies on the top of my head, shining in the harsh lighting of my outdated bathroom: my first gray hair. It mocks me as I continue my gaze down the mirror reflection to the sunken, dark potholes that are supposed to be my eyes. I quickly grab the tube of concealer and dab some, ok a lot, under my eyes before I send a 9-1-1 text to my best friend.
“I just found my first gray hair [insert horror faced emoji]. And it’s right in the front! What do I do?”
“Girl, no worries on the grays. I got all the grays. Your blonde hides everything.”
“But if there’s this one, there’s got to be more...!”
I contemplate plucking it out but decide pulling out hairs when my hair is already thinning at a rapidly alarming rate is probably not the wisest course of action. When did I get so…old?
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My mom has warned me for years that age 40 is when everything starts to go downhill. When I turned 40, I quickly realized she wasn’t kidding. Everything started to fall apart. My hips, my back, my car, my house, my mental stability. My oldest child’s senior year of school snuck up on me before I even had the capacity to deal with the emotional weight that it carried with it. This house that has nestled our family of six close together inside will soon only hold five. A heaviness sits lodged somewhere in my chest as I imagine a day that he won’t walk into the house and regale me with stories of his day at school.
I walked into his room the other day to turn off the lights and pick up the day-old clothes that lied strewn across his bedroom floor, and there on his pillow lied a Harvard T-shirt, a memento from a recent trip to Boston. It was placed carefully over his favorite of the four pillows on his bed. I paused, remembering how as a toddler he’d had a pair of green pajamas with a dinosaur that had a smooth, almost sticky texture. For whatever reason, he found it soothing to feel the logo of that dinosaur. He started carrying the pajama shirt around throughout the day, holding that sticky dinosaur up to his face. Just like a baby might become attached to a blanket or a stuffed animal, he never went anywhere without this pajama shirt. It followed him outside to the swing, on car rides, on the couch where he cuddled up to watch a movie, and eventually tucked into the pocket of his backpack.
At some point the green dinosaur lost its stickiness and he traded it out for a new shirt with a different sticky character. I took the worn out green dino shirt and tucked it away in a box because I’m sentimental I suppose and couldn’t bear to just throw it out. Over the years, new shirts were intermittently brought in as replacements. There was the Halloween skeleton shirt, an orange shirt with a fish, a black rainforest shirt, and a green one with a bear. As he grew out of character shirts, I’d find shirts on his pillow with ironed-on words in the same familiar sticky material, logos of his favorite band or sports team. In an ever-changing world, he found security in the same, soft, sticky texture pressed up against his face. Once, a dinosaur. Now, Harvard. From the days of little boy pajamas to university dreams. When the world around us feels loud and our future feels uncertain, we cling to rituals that have always proved to carry us through.
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Prayer has become confusing as I’ve aged. Having experienced enough bouts of heartbreak in all its varieties, I’ve often wondered if in fact anyone at all is listening. I don’t pray the way I used to as a child, knees bent beside my bed, hands held tightly together, head bowed, peeking with one eye to make sure I got the glowing approval of my father for this sacred nightly practice. Since then, my faith has been stretched and warped and nearly ripped up altogether.
These days I meet God in my backyard. I’m not a gardener by any sense of the word, but I water my plants each humid Houston morning. I struggle to keep even succulents alive, and they are supposedly the hardiest of plants. But every day I lug on my red Hunter rainboots and trudge outside where the air hangs heavy, but signs of life greet me as far as my eyes can see. I turn on the faucet and begin the ritual of watering each plant that lines my back patio.
It’s there that I find God in the coolness of the morning breeze. He calls to me in the cry of a bird flying overhead, landing briefly at the bird feeder for a quick bite and then swooping up into a neighboring tree. He’s there in a green lizard, jumping from a branch to the fence, swapping out the green for a coat of light brown. I see Him in the flutter of a hummingbird dancing above a red hibiscus, its long beak seeking something sweet. He’s there in a loveliness of ladybugs (how perfect is that group name?), enjoying their fill of aphids. And I see Him in the miraculous picture of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.
I rarely find His presence more readily than when I’m in nature, the ever-changing landscape of my backyard a reminder that there is beauty in the natural ebb and flow of life. Winter comes and with it, harsh conditions. But spring never fails to arrive, gathering up what looks old and lifeless and ushering in something new, brilliant colors bursting forth from dry ground.
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My son would love to go to Harvard, but his real dream is to go to the Air Force Academy. His boyhood dream of flying combat planes is so close to a reality he can taste it. And so can I. Days, weeks, months go by and I’m counting down the days that he’s got left, knowing that soon enough he’s going to launch himself out into the world. I think the parents are supposed to do the launching, but if I’m honest, my instinct is just to hold on to him like a treasure, refusing to share.
I try to convince him to stay close to home as he considers college choices, desperate to make a hometown school seem like an exciting option. But he’s aching to soar. And as much as my heart drops at the thought of him not living down the hall from me, a logoed shirt lined up on his pillow, I love that he’s chasing after something big and exciting. That he’s not afraid of what lies ahead. At least not enough for it to keep him from going after it.
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The solo gray hair meets me every time I catch myself in a reflection. A single, silver strand that challenges everything I’ve known about myself thus far. I could buy some kind of root touch-up product. I could call and schedule an emergency hair appointment. But instead, I leave it, a reminder that although change is scary, with it comes growth.
Although the winds of change promise to knock you around a little, it’s the constant pillars of truth that keep you grounded and offer security when the future isn’t clear. A season of my life is coming to a close, but something new is daring to break forth, like brilliant new colors emerging on a familiar landscape.
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