Becoming a Wise Woman
BY KATHLEEN LONG BOSTROM I
am one of those lucky women whose hair turned gray prematurely. "Lucky?" you say. "Why lucky?"
Let's back up a bit. My hair started turning gray when
I was 18. I had dark brown hair, but there appeared one day a stubborn, gray hair right along my part line that insisted on standing straight up. I cut it off. It grew back. I decided to get the best of it—I could use that gray hair to calculate how fast my hair grew. Cut it off at the beginning of a month, measure at the end, and voilà! I could tell the rate of hair growth. Useless information, for sure, but at
18, I thought it very clever. Looking back, I think, "Oh, Kathy, get a life!" One by one, the gray hairs affected
a merciless coup and, within a few years, outnumbered the dark hairs, until I had no choice but to admit that I had been the recipient of a very recessive gene that caused me to go prematurely gray. I went the coloring route for a while,
mainly due to the fact that my husband had (and still has) a head full of black hair. At the age of 34, after giving birth to our
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