On Saturday morning in middle-winter, I stand in my bathroom, highlighting the hair of one of my dear friends.
I have a special, recyclable Lululemon bag filled with balayage lightener, clips, a cape, and tin foil.
I always put it away in a place that is obvious but I can never find.
She buys and brings the light-beige toner from Sally Beauty Supply so that I can create the finishing hue of a “winterized” blonde.
This is my favorite way to transition hair from the brightness of summer and the warmth of autumn into the waiting coolness of winter.
We already plan for the spring color–bright lights of blonde around the face and nape of the neck.
I am a 7 on the Enneagram, always looking for the sunrise.
This experience is a ritual hold-over from a former life when I used to be a hair and make-up artist and do hair and make-up most weekends from February to November.
There is a preciousness to keeping intentional practices tied to my past selves.
In this moment with my friend, weaving babylights and mixing color, I can feel the stirring of my 19-year-old self stretching her smile with tenacious laughter, and I get to enjoy her again without the weight of judgment and contempt I used to hold for her.
I’ve been out of the industry for eight years, but these flashes remind me that I have lived many other lives and all of those lives still exist within me.
I get to enjoy them now.
My friend and I hold an easy conversation, as if we’re passing gratitude between ourselves.
“Here’s something vulnerable and hilarious that I’m learning about myself.”
“Oh, I love that. Me too. Here’s what I hear and how that applies to me. What about you?”
“Me too. Do you remember when we struggled here? I’m trying to repair that here.”
“Oh yes, I do. How is that for you?”
And so on and so forth until the tapestry of our woven words lands at a denouement and we are off to the kitchen to eat lunch while the color processes.
She showers, and then we go back to another layer of rich, nuanced femininity.
The gift of long friendship is that the through-thread holds.
My oldest was four weeks old when we met; he is now thirteen.
We have seen each other through the earlier years of parenting two strong-willed, prophet-minded boys whose posture of non-compliance forced us to ask for help and find rest in each other’s whispered commiserating: “This is hard for me. Is it hard for you?”
“Yes. Me too.” Sigh of relief.
Indeed, my child’s unwillingness to allow me to parent him from my own brokenness and trauma responses is what led me to the career I have now, as a trauma-informed story work coach and facilitator for The Allender Center.
I had to make a choice to let myself change. To become.
As we talk, she knows this about me too—that I needed to, wanted to, and chose to change, and that I felt the humiliation and exceptional gift of what it meant for my oldest child to look at me and insist through his resistance that I wasn’t doing my job as a mother from the most settled and healthiest place; that something wasn’t right.
So I decided to learn how to change, but like Samwise Gamgee of The Lord of the Rings, I was underprepared and overly zealous.
I went hesitantly, rage-filled, tenderheartedly, insistently, paradoxically—and all the way.
Flight by flight to Seattle.
Story by story, held, engaged, and comforted.
Pause by pause. Trigger by trigger.
Heartache by heartache. Tear shed by tear caught.
Repair by repair.
Word by word and breath by breath.
Aliveness restoring.
She knows this too. Because I lived by the belief that no failure was the final word, and I was willing to hold the pain for as long as it took to loosen.
I send her back to the shower for a double rinse and condition.
I comb, divide, and trim her hair, adding subtle layers so that the hair moves with the kind of sensuality that early middle age commands.
I blow it dry, curling and tousling the wintry-blonde strands with a salty hair balm, and we look together in the mirror.
“What do you think?”
“I love it,” she says and runs her fingers through the ends.
It’s perfect. I love it too.
It’s a fun change. Simple and almost effortless if you don’t know the story of what it takes to get there.
She knows this too.
I’m a 7 on the Enneagram.
There is no death and resurrection I won’t look for, no sunrise I will not find.
Lora Kelley is a trauma-informed story work coach and owner of Storied Living. She is a wife and mother of three children, two dogs and a bunny. She is also a songwriter and poet. She lives in North Garden, Virginia, home of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
