Blood will out

The transformation is complete. Fate is dusting off her hands in satisfaction at another one off the list, and Oscar Wilde is nodding sagely from his comfy seat at the great dinner party in the sky, because I have finally, categorically and without question, turned into my mother.

My mother and I share some physical characteristics - body type, facial features (increasingly), a disinclination to housework - but in other ways we're not very similar: I have my father's feet, eyes, and skin tone, and my paternal grandmother's hair.  My mother is a blue-eyed blonde who tans easily: I'm a wavy-haired, green-eyed, freckled brunette who prefers to say auburn. Additionally, my mum has stick-straight hair - or so she claims; she's had a perm all her life since the day she turned 16, so I can't really attest to the veracity of this, but she's adamant that nobody else in the world has hair as straight as hers. Two of my achievements that gave her the most contentment have been surpassing 5'2 and having a natural curve to my hair. (She was probably also happy when I got my degree, but I think the hair thing was more exciting for her.)

For as long as I can remember, my dad has had black and white and grey hair, except that now it's snowy white all over and the grey is confined to his somewhat impressively beetling eyebrows. He says he started going grey quite early: since his nickname in the RAF was "Badger", and that was during his compulsory military service (post-WW2 Britain) when he can't have been more than 25, I believe him. When I was 26 I remember plucking a single grey hair from my head and thinking I'd better get married pretty soon if I didn't want to have to dye the whole lot for the wedding. Since then, I've been dying it on and off and more or less, and the grey hairs they are a-marching in, but I don't think I'm quite badger-like yet, even au naturale.

Anyway, my mother almost always dyed her hair at home, at least in between perms or whatever magic it was they performed on her at the salon. When I think of this ceremony, I see her with a ratty towel around her shoulders, hair wet, a bottle of Fanci-Full hair dye on the edge of the sink, and a small bowl with a brown-bristled toothbrush completing the vista. (Fanci-Full, if you're not familiar with it, comes in a grey plastic bottle with curly pink writing on it. I believe her shade is called Frivolous Fawn, but really they're all some version of Pink Rinse and Blue Rinse and Violently Violet Rinse and Not Quite So Pink Rinse. The target market is definitely in the over-75 bracket, at least in my imagination.)

When I dye my hair, on the other hand, I use something from a box with a picture of an attractive young woman with shiny reddish-brown locks on it. It's an entirely modern and 21st-century procedure, you understand, and nothing like the Fanci-Full experience. I did it last weekend, as a matter of fact, to have my hair all nice for our upcoming holiday. But then I looked in the mirror and found I'd missed a spot at my hairline, and a few silvery threads behind my ears where my glasses had been anchored.

I'm meeting two people tomorrow I haven't seen since we all left school, more or less, so I wanted my hair, at least, to look decent. It's about the only thing I have control over - that and my toenail colour. And my eyebrows and the length of my leg hairs, I suppose. And my children. No, wait, I have no control over them, though sometimes they do let me pick out their clothes. And then they change into Halloween costumes and snowboots on 95-degree days. I digress.

So I was musing that I could mix up a tiny amount of my colour in a bowl (since I only use half a box at a time, thanks to a tip from my hairdresser) and apply it with a comb, say, just to the vital areas. A comb... or something smaller, brushier... a discarded toothbrush would be perfect...

Boom! I am my mother. Be warned. Somewhere, some day, without warning, it will come upon you too.