The Real Moms of TikTok

One morning in 2015, as 59-year-old Sally Misha Hamana waited for a department store clerk to serve her, a man — “a gentleman,” she says — lined up next to her. “I like your hair,” he told her. His throwaway comment left her speechless. She’d stopped coloring her grays a few months back, and her cropped pixie cut was 100% silver. “What does it matter what I look like?” she’d thought. “Nobody sees me anyways.”

The struggle began in her forties, when she was marketing a Texas rodeo. People began talking over her. Dismissing her ideas. Long-term colleagues sidelined her. It took forever to get served by store clerks. “People looked past me, through me. I was really struggling,” she says. It got harder each year. “Suddenly you’re just this middle-aged woman and you’re not standing out. I didn’t feel relevant.”

The offhand compliment flipped a switch inside her. She’d been seen. “It was a small thing, but it helped me see myself again,” she says. “Yes, I’m older, I have gray hair, but I have a lot of life ahead of me. I needed to get back to a life and personality that was more me.”

On February 8, Hamana, now 65, joined TikTok (username SallyMisha). She doesn’t speak till her fourth video, when she announces Louisiana is “colder than a whale digger’s ass.” The next…