My life as a Blond.

I'm blond. There is no denying it. And there is nothing that I can do about it. I was born blond. I was raised blond. I have lived the blond life. I have heard every blond joke that there is to be told. I have tried very hard to stay away from being the stereotypical blond and have for the most part succeeded. And then.... I married another blond. And now I have blond children. Walking into our house is kind of like watching Village of the Damned. We are blond.
There is only one time in my life where I wasn't blond, and that was for about 2 weeks during my freshman year of college. I decided that I was going to part ways with my blondness, and go darker. I was going for a lovely shade of red/brown. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted brown hair. Everyone had it, except for me. So I decided that I was going to test my newfound independence by dying my hair. My roommate and I hit the store where I purchased one of those lovely home hair coloring kits.
We brought it back to the dorm and read the directions carefully. I wanted to make perfectly sure that NONE of my blond hair was left when we were done. My roommate set to work on my head. As she was applying the dye...she remarked how REALLY dark it was coming out of the bottle. And she also remarked how she was making sure to put extra dye on the tips of my hair so that it wouldn't look funny. She told me that she had dyed her hair millions of time. Of course, she had lovely dark curly hair!
When she had finished the job...it was time for me to dry my hair. I took my time, and dried it thoroughly, but I didn't check my hair in the mirror as I wanted the finished product to be a surprise. I had hardly ever cut my hair in my whole life, so there was indeed a great deal of hair to be dried. Finally, when I had finished, I took a brave peek in the mirror.
Oh, Lord.
My roommate came in the bathroom to look at it. Her reaction was the same as mine.
Oh Lord.
She yelled across the hall to one of our friends to come and see my hair. She came running. And her reaction was quite similar.
Oh Lord.
"Jenny!" she screamed. "What have you done! Your hair is....is....is....oh my gosh! It's the color of a dollar bill!"
That's right. My lovely golden locks of hair, had been transformed into a hideous shade of green instead of the luscious red/brown that had been promised on the box. And when I mean hideous, I mean think back to the grossest shade of green that you can think of, and then magnify it 20 times over, and then puke on it. That's the color that my hair was. Frankenstein green.
I picked up the box that the dye came in, and read the back again. We had followed the directions to a T! I couldn't figure out what went wrong. And what's worse...the cute girl on the box happened to be laughing at me! Ugh! I tried in vain to call the costumer service line that was on the back of the box...only to realize that it was a Friday night....and no one would be there to answer my questions until Monday morning. We called another friend who was a beautician who said that no one should ever dye their hair from a box...but made a couple of suggestions to help me out.
She suggested washing my hair in Tide. Yep. Laundry detergent. Extra strength. So I did. Four or 5 times I tried to wash my hair with that toxic stuff, until my poor hair was so dry and brittle that some of it started to fall out. I wasn't about to cut my hair off, like brave Anne did in her book Anne of Green Gables! There was nothing left to do but put on a hat and wait for payday to arrive so that I could have my hair professionally dyed back to it's original color. Payday was 2 weeks away...about the equivalent to eternity to a very poor college student who had just spent her last 10 bucks on a box of hair dye.
---------------------------
You would think that I had learned my lesson about the color of hair that God gave me....not to mess with it. It was several years later, where I made an even worse mistake. Only, I wasn't the one that had to live with the funky hair color. It was my children.....a mistake that to this day I look back on with sheer mortification.
One Halloween, we had been invited to a costume party at a friend's house. My children were dressed as little flower fairies. I thought that it would be cute to buy some of that colored hair spray and spray some on their hair. I chose pink, of course! They looked so cute at that party running around in their little fairy dresses with their bright pink hair. Just adorable.
Later that evening I got them home and into the bathtub to wash out the pink stuff. BAD NEWS. REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD. I washed it several time...but unknown to me, baby hair is more porous than adult hair, and I had sprayed tons of it on my little imps. The pink was there to stay, and there was NOTHING that could be done about it. As a matter of fact, their poor hair was quite the sight for a couple of months after that....in their portraits for Christmas that year, there was still traces of pink in their hair. The relatives still talk about it to this day. I have learned my lesson.
So I have learned to make peace with my blondness. And my husband's blondness. And my children's blondness. We are blond, it's the color God gave us, and it shouldn't be messed with.