Every morning when I look in the mirror, I lean in close, as if to examine some imperfection or another. Instead, I find the thick silver hair that has sprouted right off my hairline, right in the middle. I get distressed if I can’t find it—a trick of the light, or it’s just hiding under one of its dark-haired brethren.
But when I can find it, which is almost all of the time, I feel—what do I feel? Proud? Scared? Both, and more, but mostly, I think, happy.
I always said I wouldn’t get a tattoo, mostly because I couldn’t imagine loving anything enough to affix it permanently to my body. Sure, there are names or faces of my beloveds, but, you know, what if they rob a bank or get internet canceled or something? (I’m kidding, mostly.)
Then: I was leaving L’Arche, and that felt bigger than anything I’d ever done, except, perhaps, arriving. Part of me was sure that if I ever loved something enough to put it on my body, golly, it was this. Especially because I loved it, and I was leaving it.
The numerical address of the L’Arche home where I lived adds up to the number of core members I supported.* My friend and fellow L’Archian, John, his arm already full of tattoos, designed it with a beautiful font.
I thought about getting it on my ankle, where perhaps it would guide my steps. I thought about getting it on my upper back, right above where my surgery scar starts. John asked, “Don’t you think you’d like to see it?” And I was surprised to find that yes, I would.
I felt a bit like I was getting one of our blessed covid shots when I sat down and rolled up my sleeve at the tattoo parlor in Adams Morgan. Sean, my tattoo artist, was from Boston. He had gold teeth and I felt perfectly calm. I’m pretty sure it took seven minutes, at most. John went next, getting the same design nestled among his other tattoos on his arm. And after that, our bodies were changed forever. For as long as we have bodies, are bodies, we’ll match. And for as long as I have a body, am a body, I’ll have the address of a place that was home to me, set in my skin.
I still get surprised when I see it in the mirror, sometimes. It’s high enough that you can’t see it if I’m wearing short sleeves, and I got it in January. So I don’t see it quite as often as I might, but I do see it. I flex the muscles up there—my biceps and triceps, ones that I’d never seen, so pronounced, until I started pushing wheelchairs around for a living. And it’s a change I don’t mind.
When we imagine bodies to be objects, it’s no surprise that we’re shocked when they change. Meanwhile, I for one am of the opinion that the objects in my life should never, ever show signs of wear and tear. You’d think I wouldn’t be shocked when an Apple product stops holding a charge after two years, like they always do. Or when my favorite favorite Old Navy pants get so worn out in the seat that I’ve added patches, twice, but the edges of the new fabric are fraying, still, against the thin, old, worn places.
I am not an Apple product, or a perfect pair of pants! Why am I surprised that I have gray hair?
I got a bad haircut recently, from a student. What can I say, I was lured by the promise of it being only $15. (I then, begrudgingly, shelled out the requisite $40 for my usual stylist, who acted only a little bit high and mighty about how I should have just gone to him in the first place.) At said bad haircut, the sweet person who, yes, cut one side of my hair so much shorter than the other that it was a little funny, asked how old I was. 26, I said, which was, like, eight years older than her, my god, and then she said, “Look at your sweet gray hairs!”
She’d shaved my undercut—the one my friend Eva-Elizabeth initially cut for me in the front yard at L’Arche, in June, because I was tired of having so much goddamn hair, Jesus Christ.
Until that moment, I wasn’t aware I had gray hairs. But look, the tiny little wispy shavings from my short under-hairs. Brown, and definitely, gray. Previously, when I’d finagled my friends into touching up my undercut with F’s clippers after dinner in the L’Arche bathroom, I’d never noticed.
I jokingly trace the origins of my grays back to particularly difficult moments from the last year. The three nights around Christmas, sleeping on the couch at Mount Vernon hospital after S got her new knee. The time the wheelchair-accessible cab company stranded Charles and me at church and I tried to muster the strength to walk him the two miles home. The times various people at Highland House got covid. Or the time everyone at 6th Street House did. Or the time I did, and I was convinced I’d killed my housemates in cold blood by simply breathing on them.
My mom, dark-haired herself, says this was when she started to see gray hairs, too. Mid-to-late-twenties, which is where I find myself, much to my surprise. I realize this is an age that lots of people will remind me is still very young. Most of my friends are older than me—some, much older—so I get it. I’m still a baby.
But even when I was a baby, I had a body that didn’t move like everyone else’s. My mom asked me the other day if I remember being in pain before I got a scoliosis diagnosis. No, I don’t think so, but I do remember leaving the building for recess and watching all the other kids run outside, and thinking, “Why are they all running? What’s the rush?” I don’t ever remember having boundless energy, or wanting to stay longer at active play when it was time to go inside.
I’ve always, in theory, imagined that I wouldn’t dye my hair. I think gray hair is beautiful, and anyway, it’s a lot of money and time and probably shitty for the environment, like most things we do. But my mom says she started getting her hair dyed when Grace and I were little. She was a young mom, and didn’t want to seem older than her years. Then, my brother came when she was forty, and she really didn’t want to be seen as the old mom among William’s peers’ families. Now that he’s off to college, she’s been going lighter and lighter on her hair color. I think she’s beautiful—what kid doesn't think their mom is beautiful? Only I’m not a kid anymore, and at this rate, our dark hair might lighten at the same speed.
I’m glad my body has changed over time—really. The hair is just more evidence of that, and I guess my body was still so malleable, up until this point, that the changes weren’t quite so surprising to me. I recently gave my friend, Sarah, my driver’s license info so I could come with her as she plays music in a church band in a women’s prison. The height hasn’t changed. The weight? I copied the number, then sent, “That’s a joke. I’m not 16 anymore.” Because I’m pretty sure they don’t check that you’ve updated it when you get it renewed, as if it were as enduring as my height, my eye color, or my hair color. (Which, as aforementioned—also not enduring!)
But I remember when we came out of the worst of covid, and I saw a primary care doctor for the first time in years because in college you only show up at student health for the various ailments you pick up in the dorms (the flu, pink eye, athlete’s foot, chlamydia) and, woah, the number on the scale was higher than it was in my pediatrician’s office when she said I was healthy enough to go to college.
I had a bit of a crisis, as women raised in this culture are wont to do. My hips, my thighs, my belly, oh, my. I aged! I took edibles and ate from a gallon sized Goldfish box! I bought and consumed many jar of Talenti! And when H wanted to go through the drive thru after her appointment—I always ate! I didn’t sacrifice on the altar of low carb low sugar low fat low flavor!
My partner is used to me asking questions from my anxious brain that start with, “Will you still love me, if…?”
”Yes,” he reminds me, “It makes sense that your body is different from how it looked when I met you. I love you; I love your body.”
Maybe I’m not happy. Maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that I am.
Or maybe I want to see my body, the creature. My body, the earth. Dynamic, ever-changing, because that is the primary indicator that I am alive. Like a forest, like a field of wildflowers, different every time we encounter them because they are alive and they are earth.
It was hot yesterday, and I had a tank top on. A tattoo that you wouldn’t have found on my body two, ten, twenty years ago, on display for the garden, the cat, the dog, to see. The boobs that I’ve tried to make peace with, secured in a bra that doesn’t hurt. The hair that is shorter than I’d like it to be because I had a bad haircut, lifted off my neck just where the short short hairs of my undercut that I didn’t have until last summer begin. Sunscreen on, not because I get targeted ads about skin aging that want me to buy this retinol or that serum and maybe get botulism injected into my face because all the mid-to-late-twenties girlies are doing it. Okay—maybe because of those, but skin cancer, mostly about skin cancer, and sunburn, I mean, have you seen how pale I am?
Anyway.
I am shoveling dirt from the pile in my parents’ backyard into a couple of bins, which I’ll then cart to my car, drive to my new house, and drag to my own backyard, where I will dump them in my raised bed, because I’m cheap as hell and dirt is bloody expensive. When I lift them in and out of the car, I remember that I haven’t always been able to do that. Lift heavy things. Sometimes, I still can’t, or it would hurt badly to do so. But my body has changed over time. And that means I can get dirt to my garden, where things I love can grow.
Maybe I’m practicing, because the only time my body is going to stop changing is when I’m no longer inhabiting it, and I’d really like it to be some time before that happens. And I’d really prefer if, in those years, decades, I don’t stare at myself in the mirror convinced that what’s in front of me is bad. If I didn’t spend my time agonizing over wrinkles and freckles and hair, over carbs and fat and calories, over preserving something that literally cannot be preserved.
If this, right now, is the best my body ever feels, if I’ll literally never look better, if I’ve got one wild and precious life and it already has gray hairs and wider hips in it…I guess I better get to living, then.
Take care, sweet friends.
With love,
Liddy
*I would share it—because I love it!—but I don’t feel comfortable sharing part of L’Arche’s address widely. Other privacy info of note can be found in the glossary!