Mummy's Rant

It's Day 4 since I decided to accept my grey, and so far it's going better than brilliant - very happy with the colours and it's made a tremendous difference to how I feel about myself. I've been rather reflective since Sunday (and that's not just reference to the silver catching the electric light in our house). If I'm honest, I struggled a bit with the term transitioning, because of the significance the word has for the transgender community (for the record, I'm pro LGBT+ - my anxiety rested with using the same word for my fade to grey), but I'm an English scholar, so I know it is the right word for this. For years, my roots have been an indication of my mental and physical health. When they've started to peek through (usually a week or two after they've been pasted into brown benevolence), it's been an emotional struggle to face the world - for me it was tangible evidence that I was too tired/busy/unhappy to touch them up, and people...

Sunday, I had an epiphany. For years, I've been dying my hair to hide the grey. Stuck in a corporate role, I've been slapping on the dye to present a corporate face, and hairline, and it's been tiring and expensive (and smelly - ammonia... ugh). For my 40th birthday, I was given a medical menopause, something I still have (it's the gift that just keeps on giving) and since then, the grey has become more resilient than ever. Actually, it's more white than grey, and ironically the parts of my hair that get the most dye (parting, hairline) are the baby white of an nonagenarian. Not a great look when you're not even half that age. Since I've been working for myself, and since I rarely see anyone other than my family and the postman, the need to dye my hair has become less and I've just touched up my roots for meetings and photo opportunities. On Sunday I was reading an article about the effect of the menopause on hair which mentioned the Facebook g...

When I was a little girl I figured I would marry a prince and live in a castle. I would inexplicably wear period costume and we would live happily ever after, probably with a unicorn in the garden. At no point in my innocent daydream was there even a hint that my pelvic floor wouldn't join me in this nirvana. I'd not received "the talk" at that point. When it did arrive, it involved some indistinct mumbling from a nun about snails and cupids arrows, and a demonstration of what happens to a tampon when it's put in a glass of water. That was all mildly horrific, but really got interesting when Sarah Baker's brother had to come in to our girls-only lesson, and go to the teacher's desk, where said tampon resided in all its saturated majesty. Life and reality teach us a lot, and so my childhood fantasy matured with me, until there was no period costume and no castle. I kissed some frogs and found my prince. And I exchanged my unicorn for children. As for ...