On Hair Loss and Ageing
(And the mythical book boyfriend)
“Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got til it's gone”
– Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi
My hair is falling out in chunks. I run a hand through it in the shower, in front of the TV, absent-mindedly while brushing my teeth, one hand clamped around my electric toothbrush, never sure if I’m doing it right (should I just concentrate on one tooth at a time, allowing the brush to do the movement, or am I supposed to continue see-sawing around my mouth? Who knows?). Strands float around me in the air, like dust in the aftermath of the first opening of a window in spring.
Some of it stays in my hand. I gather the strands together, wind them around my fingers until they’re all knotted together, and deposit them in whatever bin is nearest or, I’m not ashamed to say, a cup that once held tea, or coffee, to dispose of later.
The rest adheres to my T-shirt, falls to the floor or, most often, ends up in the baby’s clenched fist. Any mommy blogger will tell you just how dangerous the hair tourniquet can be; I carefully pull each hair from around, between, beneath his fingers. We do this dance several times a day, he and I. When he senses I’m about to start, his grip tightens and I have to carefully open his fist, finger by finger, sliding my own hand into the centre before he has a chance to clamp up once more.
This – this postpartum hair loss, totally normal, it happens everyone – hormones! – is not a new experience, in that I lost hair after Atlas was born, too.
But while my hair, then, came out for a few weeks, maybe a month, and left me with the sort of beginnings of male pattern baldness, little horns of bare scalp forming on either side of my forehead, this latest bout of shedding has been going on for two months at least. I’ve lost the hair on either side of my face, from above my sideburns – thank God I’ve still got those, is a thought I haven’t had once – to three inches back into my hairline.
“It’s really quite bad,” my sister says to me, as she sits across from me in my living room, holding my baby (or, as I like to refer to him, the culprit).
It’s gratifying to hear this. There are very few things one can complain about without hearing a resounding chorus of “it’s not that bad!” from those around them, and truly, fuck that, because this is that bad, and I simply can’t take any more gaslighting from people who are supposed to have my best interests at heart.
My husband is another matter entirely. I don’t want him to lie to me, per se, but when I lean over him in bed and say, “don’t tell me I don’t look like Worf”*, he laughs too much. He doesn’t lean his head towards mine, kiss my forehead and say, “you’re still beautiful”, which is, of course, what he would say if my life was one of the romantic novels I love so much.
I bring this up a lot. I’ll look up from my book and ask, accusingly, “How come you’ve never told me that my body makes you want to commit ungodly acts?!” I’ll ask, to a look of what can only be described as bore-ision, a combination of boredom and derision he wears so well (and so often).
“Don’t annoy me,” he’ll respond, flatly, before going back to watching cat videos on his phone.
I suggested to him, gently, last week, that we both try not to spend so much time on our phones in the evening. Our children are swiftly approaching phone ages, and I feel as though, soon enough, we’ll be telling them to get off their phones in the evenings — an order we can hardly expect to be obeyed if we are doing exactly the opposite.
He immediately agreed; he uttered the words, “Good idea”, but has yet to put his phone down for 10 consecutive seconds, so, you know, I’m not sure he really thought it was that good an idea after all.
Anyway, back to my (lack of) hair.
I message the hairdresser I went to most recently (is she my hairdresser? I’m not sure. I haven’t found the Holy Grail of hairdressers in Fort Wayne; my Dublin hairdresser Katherine Sweeney has ruined all others for me) and ask if she’d cut my hair short for me, or, at the very least, short at the sides, a pale echo of a hairstyle I once enjoyed on myself.
“I don’t do shorter cuts,” she tells me, “But I can see if any of the girls at the salon would?”
I am immediately disheartened. For starters, I’m not sure I suit short hair any more – my face is a lot fuller than it was back then, almost 10 years ago (what?!) and yes I know it’s fatphobic to think a short haircut only works on a slim face, but I can’t help these thoughts that have poisoned my brain — and in any case, isn’t it a cliché to cut all of one’s hair off the year I turn 40?!
I’ve had short hair several times before: as an eight-year-old, making my First Holy Communion (RIP to my short-lived religious fervour, motivated more by the possibility of making bank on the day, honestly, than anything else), my hair barely skimmed the tops of my ears, a short, pudding-bowl style that was not cute by any measure (thanks Mum); as a 12-year-old, encouraged by that very same mother, I opted to shave all of my hair off, mere weeks before I was due to play Scary Spice in the school variety show (Mum: “It’ll be so handy for the summer!” as if we lived in a tropical paradise and not in County Kildare”); as a 30-year-old, I went from the short-on-sides-long-on-type style I linked above to a bleached pixie cut, twinning with my mother (was this her plan all along?).
But there’s something different about choosing to have short hair because you believe it’ll be easier to wash, or simply because you love the style — this time, I’d be doing it precisely and only because that’s the direction things are heading (if you’ll excuse the pun) with or without my decision-making. It would be a choice borne of resignation.
I don’t imagine that I know what it feels like to lose one’s hair entirely — from alopecia, chemotherapy, or something else — but the fact is, hair is a sign of vitality, of life, and for women especially, of fertility and attractiveness, as ridiculous as that may seem.
I think about this as I watch The Substance, yes, 10 years after everybody else (for what it’s worth I thought it was a Very Bad Movie and I generally love bad movies and think they are Very Good Movies, so this is saying a lot), in which Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkles (ridiculous name, although firmly in line with the film’s ethos of telling, not showing) starts the film with a bum-length mane.
By the end of the film (and spoilers for The Substance, but also not really, as this is signposted from almost its very first minute), the “monstro” Elisabeth-Sue hybrid is left with several strands of hair which she attempts to curl, only to have them singe off and fall to the floor (a relatable queen, honestly).
In this way, Elisasue’s hair is a signifier of youth and beauty; its absence yet another visual indicator (as if we needed another) of the ravages of age and ugliness. (Please, don’t explain to me how The Substance isn’t the most ageist and ableist piece of “art” you’ve ever seen. I’ll wait.)
It’s not an original idea — in fact, it’s one we saw 35 years ago, in the original film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, in which one of the most horrifying moments of all comes when Angelica Houston removes her wig-and-mask combo to reveal not only the face of a hideous witch, but the not-quite-bald head to match.
Perhaps I didn’t find the whole hair loss thing quite as difficult with Atlas as I do now because I’m also very conscious of my age, this time around. I’d always thought — quite smugly, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear — that I wouldn’t really mind turning 40 because (please don’t hate me…) I’ve consistently believed that I looked younger than my age, partly due to my having inherited great skin from my mother, and partly because I wear runners all the time. (Very young, very hip.)
But, like so many other experiences in life, you can’t really know how you’ll react until it happens you, and my 40th birthday — although it passed with a whimper, rather than a bang, honestly — seemed to carry with it a whole lot of disappointment, as I realised I’d reached this arbitrarily significant age without having achieved a lot of the things I’d hoped to.
And, quite frankly, I’m still waiting to achieve this mythical lack of caring so many women’s magazines — and women, honestly — told me I would, once I turned 40. I’d expected to feel liberated from the shackles of beauty standards; to finally find “my style”, and not care what anyone else thought of it; to be living my life “for me!”, whatever that means (and whoever I’m meant to have been living my life for up to now).
Until I do (maybe it’ll happen once I turn 41?!?) I’ll just be here, wrapping strands of hair around my fingers and throwing them in the bin, shouting “THIS TOO SHALL PASS” over and over again, whiling away the hours until my hair grows back or my baby sleeps through the night, whichever comes first.
Please enjoy this palate cleanser: an adorably awkward and insanely talented Joni Mitchell singing Big Yellow Taxi.
*What’s even more depressing is that I’ve now Googled Worf and realised that he has far more hair than I have, especially along the sides, and excellent bone structure to go with it.