Her Roots Are Showing

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Crimes to the Third Degree.

When she was little, strangers would ask, perplexed, if she was my daughter. There she was with white-blonde hair and me with dark brown…or burgundy…or auburn…or black. She didn’t get her blonde hair from me, and I had customers in the grocery question once or twice whether I might have stolen her or comment that “She must take after her father because she doesn’t look at thing like you with all that blonde hair.”

So she keeps the blonde as she grows up. She has the kind of blonde hair most women pay a fortune for—3 different shades: white-blonde, golden blonde, and pale blonde. And by the time she’s 13, she wants to dye it blue…or pink. I’m okay with that. It’s just a form of expression and it grows out and if she wants to shave her head, hey, it’ll grow back. I much prefer a creative and self-expressive teen to a perfectly coiffed crack whore. So hair is no big deal. Least of my worries as a parent.

Each time, it grows out white-blonde at the roots. She’s since dyed it pink, blue, green (by accident), brown—which really made her blue eyes stand out and turned her into my twin, too-dark-brown by accident, and magenta for about a day. But now my 16-year-old emo-girl wants to go back to her roots. For a few months, maybe.

So four hours later and about 6 different bleach jobs, each with a different shade not found in Nature, she finally got back her natural shade at the Ritz Salon. The whitest shade, that is. The funny thing is that most people think her brown dye-job was the real thing. At least now, she doesn’t have to worry about her roots showing.