Process

I passed fifty almost two years ago and I won’t say it has been an easy transition. Unlike most other birthdays, fifty has felt like a process. In the lead up and initial days, it felt like grief—the official loss of the person I had always known, or believed myself to be. Someone young, strong, healthy, ambitious, attractive. Looking at the calendar, and myself in the mirror, I felt her slipping away.

I turned fifty the same year I got the position I had been aiming for in my work: Assistant Head of School. Not the top spot, where all of the pressure and responsibility lies, not the face of it all, but right behind her. Capable of doing the work, happy to do it just out of view, no longer feeling the need to be seen, credited, rewarded—just there to make a difference in ways that would make the school strong and improve the experience of students and staff, myself included. A fixer, a problem solver, a systems person.

That same year, Quinn entered fifth grade. It was rocky. But she got through it.

Sometime toward the end of that school year, 2021-2022, feeling irrevocably changed, I started to wonder what it would look like to stop dieing my hair. I had been covering up the emerging grays for more than twenty years. Brown hair, which I had looked at all my life, started to look strange. I found an app that allowed me to take a picture of myself and then change my hair color. I sent a silver-haired version of myself to my sister and asked her what she thought. “I love it!” she told me. “Of course you do,” I replied, “I look like your dead mother.” It was always going to be. When she died, at forty-six, hers was a beautiful silver—past the early, sludgy salt & pepper phase, and onto something shinier, more elegant. She was well into the process then at forty-six, and now I was four years past that time.

When I was younger, I imagined my transition: I imagined taking a long trip to Nepal, trekking in the Himalayas. I would shave my head for convenience and to avoid picking up lice when I slept in backpackers’ hostels. When I returned, forever changed by the landscape and the experience, I would let my hair grow out in its natural color. There would be no roots, no glacially slow process of transforming itself while others spectated. It would be the Himalayas or cancer—one or the other. That’s what I imagined. So like me: two extremes. I would transform either from an experience that was incredibly good, or one that was incredibly bad. And that’s how I’d enter the new phase, the years of my life marked by gray hair. 

I haven’t been to Nepal and I haven’t had cancer. Instead, the summer after I turned fifty, I just stopped adding color to my hair on my monthly visits. At first my hairdresser lightened it a bit, and we cut it shorter, and I told myself I could endure the process, that I didn’t look so bad. But some days I looked in the mirror and felt like I was looking at Alec Baldwin. I don’t know why him, but he was there. The process hasn’t been easy.

At the start of school last fall, students and families showed up and didn’t recognize me at first. I spent a lot of time having to talk about my hair—it was a subject I didn’t really want to discuss with acquaintances and yet couldn’t seem to let go of at home. At school, I just kept responding to people’s comments by saying, “Well, it’s a process!” At home, I just kept looking for reassurance. Was I unrecognizable to Quinn? To Sam? Was I an embarrassment? Did it make me look so old as to be in a different category now, separate from them both?

The more I looked at the evolution of my hair, the more I noticed the other changes. The weight gained, the dry skin, the wrinkles. I wasn’t sleeping. Hot flashes had been going on for seven years. I was drinking “with dinner” each night. I hadn’t exercised in years. My hips hurt—all the time. I was increasingly unhappy.

I was in a yoga class one morning and I was probably the youngest woman in the room by ten years or more. At one point, the instructor was talking about being kind to yourself and she asked “What would you say to your 40 or 50 year old self today.” A lot of women laughed. They  all agreed they would say things like, “hey, you look and feel pretty good—enjoy it!” It didn’t change how I felt about myself, but it registered.

Passing fifty is uncharted territory for me. My mother died before she got here, so I have had no clues about what to expect—what’s around the corner. Interestingly, I feel almost entirely disconnected from her, for the first time in my life. Until a few years ago, I felt a physical ache when I thought of her. I missed her every day. And I held her up in my mind as a flawless and magical person. In the past couple of years, I feel like I can’t quite grasp who she was. My memories of her feel more pixelated and she, as a person, is less tangible than ever before. Admitting this makes me feel guilty. And sad. And again, I feel like I’m walking down a path on my own.

Quinn is in a new phase too. Puberty, adolescence; she is now thirteen. And as I try to find my way through her moments, I find myself not thinking so much about what I can learn from my mother, but thinking more about what I can learn from the person I was at Quinn’s age. I was not easy. And I did not make it easy for anyone else. And Quinn is a force, like I was, but she is also not like I was. The day I got my first period, I hid in my room, trying to convince my mother, and myself, that I had just injured myself riding my bike. I refused to wear a bra for a long time. I really couldn’t accept or talk about any of it. Quinn, on the other hand, was the one to process the facts as facts. Just as she did when she was little, when she told me that it was time for her to stop wearing diapers—a fact I found difficult to accept—she asked me to buy her a bra. And on the spring day when I picked her up from the bus and she told me, casually, that she’d gotten her first period, I freaked out while she casually coached me on what to do. She had soccer practice to get to, and then her first ever school dance, and she needed me to take her to the store so she could get supplies—supplies that I should have had ready for months. And when we got to the store and I asked her what she thought she needed (pads in what size or shape?) so I could go in and get things for her, she looked at me confused: “Can’t I just go in and pick out what I need?” I honestly don’t think I bought my own supplies until I was in college; how was my fifth grader able to?

My fifth grader is now a seventh grader. She has a broad group of friends, and many talents and interests. She is incredible in every way and I love her more than life itself. And she also still struggles to manage her emotions when something sets her off. I’m smiling as I type this. Just this last week I lashed out at my boss, a few colleagues, my husband and new neighbors I haven’t even met (who are considering building not one but two houses on the other side of our stone wall, directly in our line of sight, here in this small wooded sanctuary that is the only thing that keeps me sane). The older she gets, the more I recognize the rage she expresses, and the way she fights rather than flies. When I think back to my version of thirteen, and compare it to her version so far, I can only be thankful. She is so much more reasonable than I was, so much less destructive.

Quinn on cousin Rob's sailboat in June 2023

And maybe this is why I feel so distant from my mother right now, because when I was thirteen, I didn’t like her much. She was doing everything in her power to save me from myself and I hated her for it somehow. She saved me of course, at the expense of herself, but at that time she mostly just disgusted me. For no reason other than that she was my mother and I was trying to be myself.

This past summer the mother of two former students was asking me about Quinn and I told her that Quinn was about to turn thirteen. “Oh,” she said, “well, she is about to enter a very dark tunnel, but in a couple of years she will come out the other side. Just hang in there!” I suppose I can’t reference my mother right now because I was in the tunnel during this phase. It wasn’t a warm time between me and her, and I don’t know how she navigated it or what she thought—she was on the outside.

When I think back to that time, I have only these two primary reference points:

1. Seventh or eighth grade: I thought I hated my family. I was filled with anger all the time. They took me to a therapist. I hated her too and refused to speak. I ran away one day, spent the afternoon and evening at a friend’s house. We were out walking around in the village in the dark and all of a sudden my mother’s car pulled up alongside us. The passenger door opened. She looked straight ahead and said nothing. I got in and said nothing. It had been hours. I can’t even imagine how I would feel. Actually, yes I can. Panic. My mother was steely. I’m sure I was secretly relieved. I don’t think we spoke on the way home.

2. Eighth grade: I was skipping school, stealing alcohol and getting drunk, getting into fights. My mother drove me to the high school pool where the local swim club practiced. She walked me in and handed me over to Marcy, the coach. The coach was a drill sergeant. My mother left. I got in the pool and started to swim. I was a lake swimmer in the company of pool swimming machines. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t flip turn. I didn’t have a choice. I had to keep swimming. I think of this now and wonder what my mother had to say or do to convince the coach to let me in. I didn’t belong, but I needed to be there.

I don’t really remember family vacations, or holidays or birthdays, or much of anything other than being alone in my room, but I did eventually come out of the tunnel, and thankfully it was before she died. By my senior year in high school, I thought of my mother as my best friend. That lasted throughout college. I could tell her anything, and I told her everything. But looking back, I realize we never had time to talk about those dark spots. I never thanked her for saving me. I never asked her questions I would now ask. And I don’t have her to call when I’m adrift as Quinn’s mom, trying to figure out what she needs from me.

13th birthday

Fifty and the beginning of fifty-one were difficult. I can’t say I have been fully happy or healthy. There have been plenty of happy moments, but I think I’ve mostly been disoriented. My habits and perspective have become calcified in the past seven years. I took on more responsibility at work the year Quinn started kindergarten. We had a new head of school when she was in first grade. In her third grade year, school shut down in March. In her fourth grade year, she was able to attend in person only part time to start the year, and we ended it standing outside her school, six feet apart, to watch her “graduate” in her mask. As we were trying to help her navigate this altered life, I was also trying to help 130 students, fifty staff, and all the associated families at my school to also try to navigate. Quinn entered middle school in fifth grade in a mask, the same year I became the Assistant Head of School. Kids in her school, and ours, were off the rails.

Late last winter I was at an annual doctor’s appointment, feeling pretty good about the fact that I actually scheduled it and managed to make time for it. But, feeling increasingly alien in my own skin, run down by life, and menopause, and feeling disoriented generally, I started to cry when she greeted me with a casual, “How have you been?” I had been sleepless. I had gained weight. I had started looking forward to my evening glass of wine too early in the day. I had been disgusted looking in the mirror. That’s how I had been. But crying in front of that doctor, and admitting all of those things out loud was the beginning of something. Another annual appointment a couple of months later, with another doctor, was similar but less emotional. And that was at the beginning of summer. And summer equals time.

As I approach fifty-two, I think I’m experiencing some sort of cracking open. My hair has finally emerged fully and has grown back to a length that feels like me. On good days, I think it’s beautiful. And when Quinn comes up behind me and buries her nose in my hair and breathes in, she tells me I have a smell that is always the same and is unique to me. And she likes it. 

I’ve been drinking less—almost not at all—and sleeping more. And instead of trying to fix everything, for everyone, all the time—because I realize it’s not my job and no one actually wants me to—I’ve been going for walks. Sometimes, they are long. Sometimes they are emotional. Always I find myself walking forward toward the person I used to be. 

At home, at work, and in my own life, which is a distinct thing in the midst of these other roles, I feel myself cracking off this hard shell. I don’t know what I’m doing in my marriage or in my job some days, but I do know that I’m not striving the way I used to. I’m not aiming for anything, other than good health, more time, more acceptance, more ease. Yesterday, while Quinn was warming up at her boxing lesson, her coach looked at me with a smile and said, “You’re glowing today. Why?” I laughed, told him “It’s just the white hair.” But then I thought about it. Maybe I was glowing because I was with my kid. And she was happy. And in spite of what else was going on in the background at school, or at home, or on the calendar, I was just trying to be in that moment, in my own skin. Probably it also has something to do with the detox I’ve been on for the past four months. The weight I’ve lost, the alcohol I’ve skipped, the miles and fresh air I’ve consumed. Maybe I’m really coming out of the sludgy phase, into something shinier? The silver lining. The chrysalis shed. I can feel Quinn rolling her eyes at these dramatic metaphors. It’s okay. For now, it’s all still okay.

On the train in France, April 2023