Girl with the Turquoise Hair and the Woman at Peace

I will remember that night, about a decade and a half ago, in Cafe Europa especially, because of the girl with the turquoise hair. She strode confidently into the cafe with her boyfriend. She was about the same age as I was then, maybe a little older. She was dressed in full 90's grunge, in mostly dark colors, her favorite knee-high black Doc Martins partially unlaced on her slender legs. She wore a little makeup, but not much; though the thing I noticed most in her appearance was her hair. She had bravely dyed it black and bobbed right about ear length, and, in the front, one single lock of turquoise hair on either side framed her face. She stood there, waiting at the counter to order. She didn't look around. She didn't fidget. She didn't care what anyone thought of her clothes, her hair, her choice of hot chocolate instead of coffee, her skinny waif of a boyfriend. She stood in peace while the world whirled around her, and to me, she was beautiful.


On the same night the girl with the turquoise hair was ordering hot chocolate, in the same cafe, six or seven teenage girls pondered life together over dessert at a corner table, and I was one of them. My friends and I were trying to be grown up. We had gone to see some independent flick, maybe something like Cold Comfort Farm. I was a part of the good girl / intellectual crowd. I was the type that attempts to develop a taste for coffee, the one who evaluates her own paradigms thoughtfully, and dreams about her distant future before hurrying off to make curfew. I'm pretty sure I was drinking cafe' glace', which is a poser's drink any day, as "liking coffee" doesn't really count when it's poured over a mug packed with ice cream. I remember my friends and I talking about where we would each go to university, about which of our guy friends would ask each of us to the next school dance, about the teachers we had crushes on, and how to date them after graduation(--well, maybe that was just me--what was the school thinking in hiring so many cute 23-year old men?). We shared our theories about faith and marriage, and imagined where we would live in five or six years when we were officially "grown up". We were old enough to drive cars, but not very old. I count my high school years among my happiest growing-up-years. I had good, loyal friends, friends that still know me and love me, friends that were a really positive support group for me as I broke away from my parents and toward being my own person.


Like many in their late teen years, I was struggling toward what I wanted to be, living my life in contradictions. I was loud and opinionated, but still unsure of myself. I appreciated the kindness of others, but was not habitually kind, especially to those weaker than myself. I loved sports, but worried about my makeup as much as my skill on the court. My faith in the God was real but still shallow and untested, resting on the foundations of my parents' faith. I was consumed with what everyone else thought of me, though determined to blaze my own trails.

Since seeing the girl in the Cafe Europa, I have grown up. I have been to university. I'm married with kids, and I have even moved overseas from where "home" was. I have been busy with all the good little bits that make up life, but even as a grown up, I hadn't out grown the like of turquoise hair, or the fear of what people would think of me if I had it. I have always found good reasons to keep my hair in its natural state. I thought I needed to look more traditional at Texas A & M, the conservative state university I attended, if I was going to be a proper Christian, or if I was going to attract the right kind of "Mr. Right". After university and marriage, I needed turquoise-less hair if I was going to get a good job. After kids, I was sure that people with turquoise hair couldn't make "normal" friends like I wanted to make. And the list goes on, each "reason" lived out under the yoke of slavery to the opinions of others.

. . .until Australia. If you know me, or if you have read much of my blog, you will probably know that one of my favorite parts of living in Oz has been the growth. Living here is refining who I am on the inside, revealing what in me is false, what is culturally American, and what is conviction. Solitude, which I have heretofore avoided, has become my friend, and meditation and gratitude are very slowly growing into disciplines in my life. Though the inside of me is growing deeper, on the outside, I am perpetually an opinionated and uber-honest American who wears biking clothing and cycles around my suburb, sweating profusely while attempting to corral a herd of kids that bear my image. Oh, and I am unemployed--at least not employed at a job that pays cash. So, I guess if there was ever a time when I could gather the courage to dye my hair turquoise, it would be the time when I am starting my life over as an unemployed alien, without motorized transportation, living in a foreign country among people I have never known before--in a word--NOW.

So I did it. The first iteration of my being "the girl with the turquoise hair" was more like being the girl with sea foam green hair, and my streak has variated between that and royal blue. Greg kept chuckling and smirking and shaking his head--every single time my hair was pulled back. He called my turquoise streak my Avatar hair, and wondered both silently and out loud what I could have been thinking. My girls were delighted because they suspected I might be turning into a mermaid, and were pretty sure they could keep me like a pet in the bathtub, if ever my transformation became complete. After the dye job had been perfected, I smiled every time I looked in the mirror, for a while. I kept my turquoise for a few months and enjoyed it thoroughly, especially since I had waited so long to do it, but in the end, the hair itself was anti-climactic. I dyed it back to the midnight auburn it has always been. I guess it wasn't really the hair that I liked on the girl in the Cafe.

No, it wasn't her hair made her special, and I saw that clearly in my mind's eye after I had reproduced a part of the picture in my memory on myself in the present. It wasn't blue dye, but courage that mattered, and growing that sort of courage marks the beginning of an era in me--the era in which my life begins to be lived, not in slavery to the opinions of others, but at peace with myself and God, who made my intrinsic strengths and bents and is making the inside of me more beautiful as I let Him. So, on the far side of the world, on a good day, (though not every day,) I am learning to stand still, to cease fidgeting, to stop looking around to see what people think of my hair, my hot chocolate, my kids, my convictions. Let the world whirl and even storm around me. I have already been the girl with the turquoise hair, and bit by bit, slowly, in fits and starts, I am becoming the woman with the courage to stand at peace.