It hasn’t escaped anyone in my image-obsessed family that my hair’s not what it used to be. Jonah barely notices anything, but even he’s made a sadface at my increasingly shorn locks; Ava, who used to adore the post-partum silk of my not-yet thirty-something waves now grunts at me in the morning, tussled and feathery from sleep, brandishing her own breast-length burnished bronze for me to put in a ponytail for her. Today, slick with hair oil after yet another overnight treatment, Ava, never knowingly affectionate without good cause, deigned to lay her head in my lap, perhaps by way of acknowledging my current hair sadness.
It wasn’t her that done it, but the older two have certainly had a hand in turning my crowning glory greyer and sparser, a shed that’s only been hastened by Lana’s birth. My toddler and I now pretty much match.
Now nearly three (this was written during Covid), Lana’s hair took an age to grow, and now sits in flaxen curls around the nape of her neck. Mine, which used to be straight now crinkles and winds at odd angles – not the neat cherub curls of a childhood, but the patchy paucity of perimenopausal lack.
Tom knows better than to say anything. His sympathy is met with hissed, self-conscious spite. Of course he minds, I tell him, regardless of his puppy-eyed pity. I don’t want his sympathy. I look better with short hair anyway, I tell myself.
Blessed with high checkbones and a strong brow, I was at my sexiest with a pixie crop in my thirties, the first time I noticed my hair was getting a bit shit, shortly after Ava became a toddler and I’d gone on a drastic, health saving diet. I’d hacked it off, first into a bob with an ill-advised fringe and then – and I remember exactly the circumstance under which I cut it – seethingly hungover, with a banging headache and a secret smile, I allowed the brusk Germanic hairdresser to take her scissors to locks that smelled of a tall, tattooed stranger.
Of course, 30-something men, on the whole, don’t like women with short hair, whatever they may say to their face, and the fling that elicited the haircut fell apart more quickly than my marriage, during this time of candle burning and excess, amid weeks of driving boredom.
But it wasn’t until I was made redundant, sacked and re-employed that my hair really lost its lustre once and for all. Clinging on to our house, marriage, jobs and finances had made me shed more follicles than I cared to examine and now most of my hair simply didn’t grow longer than an inch, leaving what did looking stringy and witch-like. It was a minor miracle that Lana was conceived at all.
My hair recovered somewhat during my pregnancy with Lana, until, after three months of breastfeeding, my newly sprouted lob fell out in heartbreaking tufts on an exhausting holiday to Florida.
The years rolled on. I accepted middle age with grim resilience. This time, my tummy did not recover. Neither did my hair. As I faced 40, I chopped off what was left and got Botox. HRT. Fat dissolvers followed, tackling the hereditary spread gathering around my midriff and chin. I experimented with hairloss products which made my scalp itch and flake. I tried not to care as I became increasingly invisible to all but my little girl, who loved me regardless of my fast fading looks.
And then miracles of miracles, my hair thickend as my waistline thinned. I got a new job in high finance, and the boy I was in love with at 15 started flirting with me online. It was some kind of karma for never feeling chosen as a teenager. But much like my newly taut forehead, none of it was real.
Finally, finally a doctor prescribed me oral minoxidil, a game changer which works by increasingly blood flow to the scalp. It increases it to the chin too, in case anyone’s wondering, but inch by inch, my tufty post- partum crop grew out into the flaxen mane of my early twenties (the age when I felt I might be a little bit attractive, after all.)
Perhaps if I’d had the confidence to follow my dreams (as well as the boy from home to my eventual university town) I wouldn’t have needed to seek his attention online. After all, in his own words, he had fancied me back then. But I was too busy trying to work out what to do with my life in my 20s to notice, and even then, his life was showing signs of the chaos it would descend into when I found him again in his forties.
But that is another story, and I’m not sure this is the platform for it. Suffice it to say that, like my hair, my 18 year marriage occasionally needs a short sharp chop, or maybe some nurture and narcotics. It always grows back, just with more grey and frizzy bits…
*Update* Ava cut her hair off in 2024 to my dismay. It really suits her.
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