THE MIDDLE ROAD. Not a place I know well, am prone to explore, or even feel comfortable navigating. That’s not the sister I am. Never have been. And yet, that’s what I’ve just been told to do. What to do?

The advice this month from the TSP astrologer and pal, Sheilaa, is that I hove to the middle place. I’m not sure I even know how. An Aries and a redhead, I am all about extremes, even when being so exhausts and depletes me. Though as I age, I am also all about taking the wise counsel that is offered by the sisterhood. So I’ll try. Though I’m taking suggestions as to how one does this.

Yes I am.

And I had to look no further than TSP sister Paige, for some great reading tips on how another redhead and Aries is attempting to find the better, gentler, calmer place to live.

Thanks, sister.

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WHAT’S A REDHEAD to do? We try to behave. Really we do. And we try to calm our tempers. But it’s no good, as little good as trying not to feel the sting of the pain at the dentist, or letting ourselves go under at the anesthesiologist; asking us to behave is like asking us well, it’s like asking a redhead not to blush. It’s just not going to happen, now is it? And why would it, when yet another American icon has gone and reinforced the idea that redheads are–how shall we say—hot?

Have you seen the new Barbie? Specifically the Mad Men Barbie collectible of office manager Joan Holloway? Our dear friend Pam, at Retro Renovation, brought it to my attention (thanks, sister) and I’ve been laughing out loud ever since.

If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. If not, well, get a load of this, my redheaded sisters, and then try to act like a brunette.

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WHO CROSSED YOUR PATH FIRST on New Year’s Day? If it was a redhead, you may need to fasten your seat belt for a bumpy 2010, since at least one beginning-of-the-year tradition holds that the person first crossing your threshold in the new year decides the luck you’ll have for the next 365 days.

The name January is derived from the two-faced God Janus, a principle diety in Roman mythology. Originally the god of light and day, he gradually became the god of beginnings, including gateways and doors, which in part explains why many of us still huddle in our doorways on New Year’s Eve, letting out the old year and letting in the new.

Taken from the ancient English and Scottish tradition of “Hogmanay,” which in turn comes from the name of a cake given to children on New Year’s Eve, the tradition also has pagan origins in its belief that the spirits of those years are flowing out of–as well as into–the house. Some followers of this rite observe what is called “first footing,” believing that the first person to cross the threshold in a New Year will affect the fortunes of the dwellers.

The connection to redheads is found in the superstitions specifically about the color of the hair of those whose feet first cross your threshold. Regardless of their sex, the belief is that dark-haired people bring the best luck; blondes means no luck at all; and widowers of any hair color bring bad luck. But the worst luck? It comes in with a redhead. In fact, there was a time when people actually hired what became known as “first footers,” based on what luck they would bring to the household, and redheads never got the job.

How do I know this? I wrote a book on the hair color called The Roots of Desire, and tend to think of members of my color set as a sisterhood of red hair. And by the way, I don’t believe that bad luck thing for a moment. I’m frequently the first one in the household back through the doorway, though now that I think about it, my sister, Margaret, has never once invited me over to her house for New Year’s Eve. Hmmm.

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I TOLD THEM, AND I TOLD THEM, and I told them again. And still the doctors did not listen. I awakened during procedures; worse, I never fell asleep. Then, finally, science backed me up and I had something to show my doctors before they brushed away my claims of both needing more anesthesia and feeling more pain than most people. Turns out that I am one of a rare breed of mutants who does. Are you?

Redheads. We know we are different. Getting others to know it too has always been an issue. And while I wrote about all of this in my book, The Roots of Desire, pieces of this research keep resurfacing, each time causing the same astonishment. People are shocked to learn that redheads are actually a breed apart, though any redhead could have told you that.

Now we can tell you why, since last week the story was back, this time on CNN health. This time relating the inability to knock out a redhead with her fear of dentistry. Well, duh.  And while any redhead could have told you that we are harder to subdue than any blonde ever wished to be, now we can show you the facts on why.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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Maybe my red hair made me search for our genetic and genealogical history.

O NE HUNDRED MILLION Americans are tracing their roots, and while genealogy is a fast-growing American pursuit, many people begin their search with little more than an old photograph and a shred of a family tale. That’s all I had, and as we learned from the recent mystery of the twins here on TSP, much can be learned from very little. While researching a book on redheads a few years ago, for instance, I tried to trace my own hair color.

On my mother’s side is Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War hero whose shock of red hair was only one of his striking features. On our father’s side I had little to go on except that he was a redhead, as was his mother.

But I had an unidentified glass slide, as well as a crumbling paper on which my paternal grandfather had written: “My mother’s name was Annie Madsen Johnston. Her father drowned in the Mersey River when she was ten. Alexander Johnston. 1865. He was a Dane. A ship’s rigger.” The slide and the note were found years apart in separate boxes. I always wondered if one went with the other.

None of this interested Margaret. She never liked that grandfather, she doesn’t have red hair, and she pretty much thought I was off on the kind of wild-goose chase that little sisters are famous for. Ah, birth order and its insistent stereotypes. (Here’s another: One person always gets designated as clan genealogist. Which one? Tell me your tale, and we’ll see if I’m right.)

I emailed a print of the slide to merchant marine offices in England, seafaring collections, even a hat museum in London. I hired Origins Network, a genealogy firm specializing in English ancestors. All I learned was that no efforts were made to pluck drowning victims from the River and so, no burial, no cemetery record—nothing.

Hours passed in the basement of a local Mormon Church, utilizing the vast genealogy resources amassed as a public service by the Church of the Latter Day Saints (we grew up next door to another local Mormon church, but were not members).  Now online and free to all, their Personal Ancestral File (PAF) software, while remarkable, held no clues to my ancestor.

Refusing to be undeterred, (another second sister birth-order trait), I switched tacks, trying merely to match my grandfather’s note to the photo, and called Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, America’s premier maritime museum, and soon was spending the afternoon with Matt Otto, Mystic Seaport’s head rigger.

“That’s your rigger,” he said, explaining that the rigger’s hands and face were smudged with the black pine tar only another rigger would recognize and how the finger pads were wide from years of running line beneath them.

“There was a district in Liverpool that made these,” said Matt, tapping the hat in the photo.

Liverpool. Of course. On the Mersey River, it’s a main port, and the site from which my grandparents left by ship to come to America.

“It’s straw. Called a broad-sennett hat. It’s made of cane stock,” he said, as I felt myself get braided ever more deeply into a story that I had once thought was only about my hair.

And Margaret? She now displays the rigger’s image in her home and, I’d like to add, it was Margaret who discovered the photo cache of TSP’s mystery red-headed twins, apparently having realized what a treasure these things can be.

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JUDAS WAS A REDHEAD. And that was pretty much that for any hope of redheaded men ever being considered icons of attractiveness, trustworthiness or temperance. Red-haired women, by comparison, fare far better, forming a sisterhood whose stereotypes are far more flattering, though no less ancient.

In fact, the expectations we still have of redheaded women—sexy, fun-loving, hot-tempered—pre-date Judas, and can be found as early as 600 BC, in prescriptions against ever acting like someone named Lilith, the world’s first redhead (and the subject of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, above). Pretty much ever since, as any redhead will tell you, every redhead has come in contact with beliefs about our behavior that are as much a marker as the haircolor itself.

The color itself divides us from others, even from our sisters. Forever, I’ve been “the redheaded Roach sister,” or merely “the redhead,” though no one ever calls Margaret, “the brunette.” And with that color-marker came the expectation that of the two, I am the wild one. And I was, though I am not now. Hot-tempered? I was, and I still am. Fun-loving? Always. Does this mean that she is none of these things? Not at all, only that any of these behaviors are not universally expected from her.

The behavior expected of redheads may be why more women than ever are making the decision to ramp up the color. While only 2 percent of America is naturally red, 30 percent of women between 18 and 34 years old who are coloring at home are going red—a 17 percent jump in recent numbers. The newly converted include top model Coco Rocha, who just gave in to what is reported to be a lifelong yearning to do so.

My theory on the hike in the color is that women, no longer afraid to be powerful, are finally willing to telegraph that power. I see redheads everywhere. And while I have only this advice to offer all those newly-reds—do as you like, not as you are expected to do—I wonder what Margaret might say to a sister who has transposed herself to my side of the color wheel.

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I DON’T KNOW MUCH about geometry, but Margaret sees the metaphor of math in life. She was much quicker than I in seeing how sisterhoods are sets and subsets, as well as how varying pods of women gracefully flow into our lives and then ebb away when a shared goal is reached. She is also more patient. Me, I’m always in a rock fight with someone—however metaphorical—and the only math I seem to do is keeping score of who did what to whom. I’m unwilling to see things in the tidy terms of pie, flow and bar charts, but it’s unclear if I come by my outlook via nature or nurture since I am a redhead. Which, Margaret points out, is a sisterhood of its own: the Sisterhood of Red Hair.

You’d think I would have thought of it myself: I wrote a whole book on the topic not long ago. But I needed Margaret’s reminder about this bigger sisterhood of mine.

This is not to say that redheads aren’t friendly and don’t make new friends, or that we don’t appreciate it when we do. We do. In fact, just the other day I made a new friend.

As our voices blended into one maniacal incantation that our daughters make toast out of the other team, that delicious feeling swept over me, that glorious combo of connection, wonder and gratitude.

If there is a more glorious place than the bleachers on a Saturday morning, watching Middle School girls play basketball, I’m not ready to go there, too content am I up in the top row, clutching a steaming cup of tea, scorching myself with its contents every time I throw myself into the air when my daughter’s team merely takes possession of the ball. So attuned to the game was I last week that I barely noticed when a woman I only know as someone’s mother, plunked down next to me and began screaming right along.

We nodded at one another, and as our voices blended into one maniacal incantation that our daughters make toast out of the other team, that delicious feeling swept over me, that glorious combo of connection, wonder and gratitude for which probably the Chinese have eight words but we mere English-speakers have none. I had a new friend. By 11 AM I had no voice left and neither did she, making her near-whisper of what she then told me not one of confession, but rather of necessity.

“Got thrown out of a game recently,” she rasped.

Whatever the reason, I didn’t care, instantly knowing that she was now in my subset, my tribe, one of us. Redheads are very loyal, though no one seems to know this.

It seems that there was an ill-timed lull in the cheering last fall during her daughter’s soccer game. My new friend hadn’t meant to be heard by anyone other than the woman then sitting with her, so it wasn’t one of those awful parents-screaming-at-the-ref moments. Not at all. Trying merely to agree with views previously expressed by her bleacher mate, my new friend was only conceding that yes, the ref was, in fact, not a bit metaphorically, but literally, a bodily part from which we evacuate.

And in the nano-second before she said what she said, the crowd had hushed, the quiet allowing her comment to wash over the benches, the players, the nicely-cropped field and right into the ref’s ears, prompting him to say, “Whoever said that has to leave right now.”

And so my new friend had to walk the walk of shame, out into the parking lot, to sit out the rest of the game in her car.

Did I say earlier that I am not all that patient, or forgiving? I beg to differ, though I would fight to the death that it’s not because redheads are fickle, argumentative and generally as hot-tempered as some people seem to believe. I can change my mind as easily as I can forgive my new friend. And not merely because she, too, is a redhead, though she is, making her a member of subset of sisterhood even I can spot a mile away.

Care to join us?

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