I’ll be honest, here, and admit that with the foolish overconfidence of youth, I was actually a little excited to get gray hair. Silver runs in my family, so it was easy to picture myself aging into a bohemian Stockard Channing character or, even better, Aunt May from Twister. I figured it would start on the earlier side, too. I had visions of myself at 45 with a beautiful, stylish streak in the front, like some sort of artist or cool side character in a romcom about witches.

Obviously I never even thought about the crow’s feet that would come with the grays, or the increasingly specific conditions I’d need to sleep, or just how weird my period would get. I told you this was youthful overconfidence speaking.

Well, here I am, and as it happens, I only have a small handful of silver stands sprouting. Out of my head, that is. Downstairs is suddenly a different story. And I am not loving it. It is not glamorous.

I probably first noticed it while doing some light grooming in the bright light of my bathroom. (What can I say — the light just isn’t that good in front of my full-length mirror, and usually I’m looking at where the hemline hits in relation to my boots. Not whether the curtains match the drapes anymore.) There I was, whacking away the weeds so to speak, when I took a closer look. How was it possible that I’d never noticed that bits of my hair down there were a bit… ash blonde? Was it possible to have ash blonde highlights in your pubic hair? Could your pubic hair change colors? I took a closer look. It was not ash blonde, or old money blonde, or any other type of blonde. Nor was it dark like the hair on my head.

Nope, it was gray.

Gray, like the hair on the head of some grizzled, hard-drinking detective in a Scandinavian noir. Gray, like a pewter pitcher. Gray, like the walls of any house in any early Flip or Flop episode. Slap a chevron pillow down there and list it on Zillow circa 2015, folks.

My pubes were going gray.

And the gray isn’t even silver!

I was never particularly scared of aging. It happens, and I always figured I’d be pretty good at being older. I’m certainly enjoying giving less and less of a shit about things that don’t matter, with every passing year. I feel strongly that I earned every creaky joint and fine line and the freckles that are increasingly actually age spots. I know a lot, and — more importantly, as opposed to when I was younger and more insecure — I know what I know and what I don’t know, and I’m now feel capable of getting answers to the latter.

But all that said: boy, I really was not ready for this one. It’s not like nobody warned me, either! There’s a Sex and The City episode about this very phenomenon. Samantha finds exactly one gray hair in season 6 and promptly dyes her pubic hair, giving her whole groin a Bozo the Clown makeover. I don’t even remember this episode, it made so little impression on me; if I watched it, I surely thought she was out of her mind for doing something so silly, smug in the conviction I’d never lose my sense of proportion like that as I aged.

Well, I’m not saying to pass the hair dye… but I’m definitely gonna lean a lot closer to the Prince William post-bald-spot buzz cut. Somebody pass the trimmer.