Abby Maguire

Abby Maguire was born in NYC and raised in Larchmont, New York. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and an MA in English from Monmouth University. Her creative work has appeared in What Doesn’t Kill You: An Anthology of YA Short Fiction. It has also earned an honorable mention in the Glimmer Train Short Story Contest for New Writers as well as being shortlisted for the Bridget prize. She serves as Creative Director of the online literary magazine SPOKEN! and is currently a full time lecturer at Kean University. 

Silver Strands: How Covid Taught Me to Embrace the Gray

Aside from having the loveliest name on planet earth, Kitty O’Meara is also the poet behind the meme heard around the world: “In the Time of Pandemic.” Perhaps you’ve read it. In the spirit of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, O’Meara begins her poem with the line, “And the people stayed home…” She goes on to describe examples of the timeless paradox unearthed by 2020: Alone, Together. Lurking beneath O’Meara’s “‘we’ are ‘one’” message of unity and singularity, the result of our forced stoppage of life as we know it has afforded us the opportunity to reflect on the purposes and pleasures that have gotten away from us. She argues that in our most natural state, free of consumption, pollution, and the distractions of a pre-Covid life, humans are, innately, “good.” And, in Kitty’s future, we will return to “good” when this is all over.

It is a lovely sentiment, indeed. As captivating as the poem was for the week or so it circled the Internet, it soon lost out to the murder of George Floyd, record-breaking West Coast wildfires and news of a sitting president who proclaimed he would not leave office despite the fact that the people had voted him out. Not to mention, of course, the millions of lives lost to this dreaded disease. But that’s not to say the poem’s message disappeared entirely. In my personal thirty-five-year-old-white-woman-living-in-the-suburbs-of-New Jersey existence, I reflected on the poem the way one would expect a person of my particular demographic and privilege would. I thought about myself.

In my new work-from-home-while-homeschooling-three-children reality (amazing husband included, but my dude is of the essential variety and therefore absent from the homestead during the daylight hours), I was losing my fucking mind. It became abundantly clear to me that Kitty could not possibly have children. (Fact check: she lives with her husband and dogs). But the thing she got one hundred percent right was her line, “And the people began to think differently.” Yes, Kitty. Indeed they did. 

While I was scrambling to keep my kids afloat and my house afloat and my 100+ college freshmen who I was now teaching remotely afloat, my major shift in thinking centered around my conception of beauty. As a woman, I’ve always been conscious of my image. I understand my face should look its best when it goes out in public. But after the world went indoors, my concern for my appearance, or rather, my concern for “keeping appearances,” took a sharp left turn and kept on driving. I simply did not care. But Kitty’s assertion that we “began to think differently” went further than just the dismissal of my own beauty regimen. 

Browsing Instagram one afternoon to dull my wound and ever-winding thinker, I noticed a change in the feed of celebrities who I found attractive. To my surprise, the starlets I was now finding myself drawn to were those in their forties and fifties with non-botoxed, non-contoured, foundation-free faces. The screw Sephora attitude I had adopted mid-quarantine had infiltrated the boundaries of Hollywood. These glamorous gals allowed themselves the dignity to age like humans and, in turn, normalized for me what a woman’s face looks like beneath the filters and Goop. Now I’ve always found frozen forehead, plumped up lip-injected cheek filler-ed faces unappealing. Think, The Real Housewives of fill in the blank. But this was different. I was, for the first time ever, finding beauty in the laugh lines, in the crow’s feet. What I used to think of as bulging bug eyes now looked like, well, eyes. Beautiful female eyes. The patriarchy cell walls built up around me were crumbling. This is what a woman looks like. And it is beautiful.

But my new definition of beauty didn’t end there. As April poured into May and June, my hidden army of gray soldiers began to sprout from my roots marching forward down my hairline with fierce determination. Unlike the typical pre-Covid freak out reaction I would have had when they arrived before my next touch-up appointment, I remained cool, calm and collected. We were in the middle of a crisis, afterall. Society understood. So, I gave myself permission. Then, after some time, I started to think, Wow, these gray hairs aren’t so bad. I actually kind of...like them?

It took a while for me to figure this one out. I had been trained to fear gray hair since I was cognitively able to process what it meant to grow old. How could I all of a sudden be finding these signs of aging attractive? I was puzzled, but convicted nonetheless. Even my language changed. No longer did I refer to them as gray hairs. I renamed them Silver Strands.

By the summer my centimeters of silver had grown to inches, sparkling against my roots like tinsel on an evergreen. Brushing my hair in the mirror one afternoon, admiring the new dimension these lines of shine produced, it suddenly occurred to me why I had so easily accepted my new hair reality. Silver Strands looked exactly like the yellow and gold highlights I, at times in my life, paid ridonculous bucks for. Exactly the same! Only they weren’t gold. They were silver. And they were absolutely free.

Why? I asked! Why is this wrong? Why should I shudder at the hair that grows from my aging mortal head? What is the meaning of this!?

But the answer is simple. Like wrinkles, gray hair means that I am old, or, in the process of getting older. This is what happens when year after year you manage not to die.

The issue, then, is not that I find anything ugly about Silver Strands—quite the opposite. The issue is that I have been trained to fear the aging process. Someone taught me to cover up any sign of getting older as quickly as possible. As women, we joke about it. “No one likes those pesky grays!” We laugh at memes about it. We inject poison into our faces.  We are flattered when someone mistakes us for being younger than we are. We gasp with envy and awe at anomalies like Halle, JLO and Salma who make fifty look like twenty-five. We have blindly accepted this cultural norm: when we lose our youth, we lose our sex appeal. When we lose our sex appeal, we lose our value. We become worth less. Not worthless. Worth less.

No one looks at me when I walk into a room the way they did when I was a teenager. Well, that depends on the audience, I suppose, but the older I get, the smaller the pool of men who look twice. As I continue to stay alive, I will be noticed less and less, therefore I will have fewer and fewer chances of being heard. Unlike men, a woman’s sex appeal is directly proportional to her age. The older she gets, the less desirable. The less desirable, the less valuable. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about the presidency or the PTA, women are appraised by their sexual worthiness in every situation. I’m not saying that is the only measure of a woman’s worth. But it is the first.

Not dying my hair, then, is an act of defiance. This appeals to me. But at the expense of losing my voice? Female power is fragile enough as it is.

I do not know what will come of the world after a vaccine and the upcoming inauguration of Joe Biden and our first woman and woman of color Vice President Kamala Harris. We have every reason to be hopeful. But could change at the level of Kitty’s predictions really come to fruition? Or will we surrender our yoga pants and step back into stilettos, driving our Sport Utility Vehicles up and down the parkway to work ten hour days? I’m at the mercy of my employer on that one, but as for me and my Silver Strands, I’m holding strong. I’m now free to visit my hairdresser to get my hair “dressed” in browns and blondes if I so choose. But the last time I saw Becky, all I did was ask for a cut.

“A lot of women are doing that now,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. My boss isn’t happy about it. That’s where we make all of our money.”

So it’s not just me.

“What do you think?” I asked my mom who frequently implores me to help cover her silvers when she stops by for a visit.

“Oh I agree. The women at work who used to come in all dolled up swapped their makeup and jewelry for a pair of sensible flats. They’re done.” I didn’t ask if they stopped dying their hair, too, but I would venture to guess at least some of them had.

For me, the most promising lines of Kitty’s poem are these: “And in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.” I’m not saying that recognizing, respecting and valuing women as we move through the stages of our lives is the only change necessary for universal healing. But it is a solid start. 

All I can say for sure is that when it comes to looks, this pandemic has redefined my idea of beautiful. As a thirty-five year old woman, I’m okay with looking like a thirty-five year old woman. Wrinkles, bug eyes, silver strands. And if I’m not the only one, perhaps this shift in perspective can grow and shine, much like the silvers sprouting from the roots of my scalp. What would truly make America great is if we could march forward into a future where a woman's value did not dissipate with every strand of silver, every line of laughter, every sign she has managed to stay alive one day at a time.