My Blue Period

Moving back in with her parents at 49, in conservative Alabama, Kristine Lloyd proves you're never really too old to rebel.

David S. Soriano

A lot of kids moved back in with their parents during Covid, including me. Except I wasn’t a kid per se, but a quasi-functioning adult in dire need of a hug. I left Seattle, where I’d lived for 14 years, drove cross-country to Birmingham, Alabama, and moved back into my childhood bedroom. Surrounded by high school yearbooks, regrettable 80s fashion choices, and the silent judgment of a giant, carnival-sized teddy bear—a gift from my first boyfriend—slumped in the corner, I found myself living in a murky state between teenager and middle-aged self-pitying spinster. 

It seemed like the perfect time to dye my hair blue. 

I did this on the cusp of my 49^th birthday. I was about due for the mom haircut – you know the kind, the perky bob, shaped like a fir tree. All your youth lopped off with one cut. A haircut that transforms you from doe-eyed ingénue to knowing, middle-aged frump in Keds and holiday-themed sweaters, relinquishing your sexuality to the demands of motherhood. Except I’m not a mom. I just look like one. 

I left Seattle, where I’d lived for 14 years, drove cross-country to Birmingham, Alabama, and moved back into my childhood bedroom. 

I have always looked sweet and demure, which is probably why I cuss more than most people I know. I have tried every haircut and outfit and still look like I should be running a Girl Scout troop in a church basement. The flower-and-vines tattoo I got on my foot at age 40 (excitedly telling my mother, who proceeded to hang up on me) now looks like a fading spring break lark, something a woman comes to regret once reforming into suburban marriage, orthopedic flats and pancake breakfasts. 

Even though I’d been bred to marry and make babies, I never did. I’d been given this self to fill in like a chalk outline, and yet when I shed that self, more out of necessity than desire, what was I left with? Who else could I or would I be? What I looked like no longer fit who I was. But who was I besides a grown woman living in her childhood bedroom, stalled out in middle-age, unsure of what to do or where to go next?

I’d wanted to dye my hair since moving, in my 30s, to Seattle, where all the pink-haired, blue-haired, purple-haired women roamed. You could tell these exotic rainbow-dyed pixies were cool, interesting, spontaneous. Not women who got bogged down by overthinking, complicated skin regimens, or color coordination. No, this girl got out of bed all dewy and hair-tousled, ready to greet the day without the dread of things that could go wrong.  

Even though Seattle was a cerebral town, concerned with high-minded pursuits, there was still a look: 90s grunge distilled by time and mass production into an artfully disheveled, swaddled in enormous scarves, frayed jeans, bedhead kind of aesthetic. I felt my generic appearance hindered my assimilation, or perhaps this was easier than imagining all the deeper reasons I never seemed to fit in. I looked nothing like the hip chicks with lady mullets and dreads and fades. 

When I first moved to Seattle, I asked my new co-workers where they got their hair done. An older woman who suffered the same conservative-woman façade I did, suggested I go to a place called Vain.  

Surrounded by high school yearbooks, regrettable 80s fashion choices, and the silent judgment of a giant, carnival-sized teddy bear—a gift from my first boyfriend—slumped in the corner, I found myself living in a murky state between teenager and middle-aged self-pitying spinster.

“But don’t tell them what you do for a living. I never do. Otherwise, they’ll give you the haircut they think you should have, instead of what you want,” she said, tucking strands of her sandy brown bob behind her ear. 

“Yeah, but all they have to do is take one look at me, and they’ll give me a librarian haircut anyway.”

I told the stylist at Vain: “I want something funky. Maybe cut it short in the back, but not asymmetrical, and not too flippy. And do not bring a razor anywhere near my hairline, but make it cute, and cool, you know, just whatever you think is best.” She’d picked up on my neurotic vacillation between aspiring badass and rule-following good girl and gave me a perfectly generic haircut. 

I kept going back. She was fun to talk to and wore wild glasses and colored her hair and chopped it off and grew it back long, like it was no biggie. Like experimenting with alternate selves was exciting and easy, not something frightening and permanent. At some point, I brought up the possibility of color. 

“But your hair is so pretty,” she’d say. She sounded like my mother who’d remind me that only 4% of the population has red hair like mine and coloring it is sacrilege. But as every redhead knows, “Reds don’t gray, they just fade away,” and with each passing year my shiny copper hair turned brassier, duller. Not only was I unhip, I was fast approaching old and unhip, which is to say aesthetically dead. 

“I want pink hair,” I said on the next visit. Over the holidays that year, I’d be flying to my boyfriend’s hometown in Texas, and I needed to bring a little bit of edgy Seattle with me. 

It seemed like the perfect time to dye my hair blue. 

“Are you suuuure? I’d have to strip all the color out and the pink doesn’t even last long.” I wasn’t sure whether she just didn’t want to fool with it or feared I’d hate it and blame her. 

“What if we just did a little piece underneath so you can see what it would look like?”

That seemed like the perfect compromise. 

I’d dig through my hair to find the pink stripe and show it to everyone. My tiny sliver of cool kid cred.    

In conservative Alabama, where being unwed is far more remarkable than in Seattle, dyeing my hair seemed like the best way to advertise my nonconformity. But I still wanted to look good. 

I bought hair dye at Walgreen’s. I don’t know why I thought I could turn myself into the kind of person who uses Pulp Riot hair dye when I still wear sweater sets on occasion, but I was bored and restless and feeling old. Feeling like I’d somehow failed at life for never marrying or having children and moving back in with my parents, not to take care of them, but so they could take care of me.    

“You’d better not spill that on my white tile,” my mother said, as I headed upstairs.           

I put on the plastic gloves, laid out an old towel and worked the dye into my hair, except, in my haste to get my hair up into the plastic cap and avoid dripping on my mother’s tile floor, I didn’t follow the explicit instructions to massage the blue into the roots. Blue hair, I found out, isn’t something you want to half-ass. I ended up with a ring around my head where the color ended – a DIY balayage that looked like a Kool-Aid disaster. My dulled red hair looked darker, dingier against the deep sea-blue dye, which lightened with each shower into blue-gray. I’d been growing my hair, and my normally above-the-shoulders bob reached my collarbone, the hair hanging heavy and limp with a messy frizz at the ends, like a mangy Irish Setter. I’d wanted to look like Lady Gaga at the Golden Globes; instead, I looked like a Wal-Mart shoplifter. 

“You look like an old lady,” my mother said triumphantly, having told me numerous times what a bad idea it was.

I met up with old friends for an outdoor movie festival. It was dark, so my sea blue hair blended in with the dusky haze.

“Did you do something to your hair?” one of my friends asked, studying me curiously. 

“Yeah, I colored it blue. Just for fun.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” she said, in a tone that indicated it definitely was not cool but the bounds of polite Southern society kept her from expounding further. 

My hair got worse by the week. The blue faded to lavender, then to grey, and the longer my hair grew, the more lifeless, shapeless and sad it looked. Like I’d been living in the woods. 

Observing myself on camera at work meetings, I could understand why so many women of a certain age kept their hair short. 

I felt her thin fingernails lightly grazing the nape of my neck. I used to love the way, when I was younger, she’d softly run her fingernails through my hair. It’s such an intimate thing, someone you love cutting your hair. 

I asked my mother to chop it off—to chop off all the remaining dyed ends, the sad parts, the limp bits, to lop off what was dragging me down. 

“Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. How about I book you an appointment with my lady?” 

“No. I don’t want to pay for a haircut right now, and I just want it off my neck,” I said. “It’s driving me crazy. I’ve cut my own hair before. It’ll be fine.”

I put my hair in a ponytail and told her to cut it off. We were outside, on the cracked patio, me sitting in one of their sun-faded deck chairs. 

“Ok, here we go,” she said, slowly cutting through the thick ponytail. I could feel her warm breath on my neck as the cold metal brushed against my skin. 

“Wow. Look at that,” she said, holding out my chopped ponytail. A part of myself shed just like that. I felt buoyant.   

“Now let me just even it up a little,” she said, pursing her lips, studying the ends.  

I felt her thin fingernails lightly grazing the nape of my neck. I used to love the way, when I was younger, she’d softly run her fingernails through my hair. It’s such an intimate thing, someone you love cutting your hair. 

I’d left Alabama because I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, be what it demanded of me, what my parents wanted. I fled to Seattle, searching for something, some sense of place and acceptance, in a city full of cool people, where I never felt quite myself. My mother’s fingers tenderly brushing away fine hairs clinging to my neck brought me to the verge of tears. I’d been ashamed to come home, to admit defeat, but it wasn’t defeat that brought me home. It was love. I’d wanted to make myself interesting and hip, so I’d be loved and legitimized by interesting and hip people. I’d always been like that – chasing some version of myself I believed would be better, when the people who already loved me didn’t care what I wore or how I styled my hair.