women your age

Unless you count the eighties (and I think it’s in our collective best interest not to), I have always had good hair. Straight and shiny. Fine, but plentiful. And unless you’re my youngest son finding a stray stand in his bathwater, it’s nice to touch.
 
But life has this way of handing out lessons about vanity, even the smallest and most harmless among them.
 
One morning in the shower, a thick ribbon of wet hair ran down the back of my leg. The sensation made me flinch, and I looked down where a nest was forming in the drain. I panicked and ran my hands down the length of my ponytail. They came away with a tangle of dark strands.
 
By 45, I’d already confronted and accepted some hard truths about my aging form. My two babies had taken the best of my body and my mind and made them…mushier. Breasts that had always sat at attention suddenly hung like tennis balls shoved into the toes of a pair of stretched out tube socks.
 
Middle age took over where childbearing left off. The hair on my chin grew wiry and multiplied, while simultaneously my near vision went to shit. I can’t decide if this was nature doing me a kindness or having a laugh. My face was slowly melting down into jowls. Everything, it seemed, had gotten wider and lower.
 
But this new loss was staggering. Maybe because there was so much of my identity wrapped up in my hair and the unimpeachable goodness of it. Or perhaps there’s only so much staring at a stranger in the mirror that one body can take. It wasn’t long before I avoided brushing, washing it or even touching it. My hair became the texture of my everything. Spilling onto my yoga mat in class, clinging to my clothes, and clogging up my vacuum.
 
The first doctor I saw crossed the room, rubbing sanitizing foam between his palms and said confidently, “I’m happy to take a look. But this is common in women your age.” There was nothing he could do for me.
 
I sat with that indignity in silence and got out of his office as quickly as I could. Outside in my car, I seethed. If I had come in with flaccid man bits, he’d have written a prescription with haste. Bald women, we accept as nature’s will. But not floppy dicks.
 
It took four more months before I saw a specialist. This time, a woman physician in a clinic owned and run by women. She hovered over my head with an iPad, the sound of an artificial shutter clicking away as she documented my scalp. I had lost, by her estimation, 30 to 40 percent of my hair.
 
“My suspicion is that this is autoimmune,” she said. “Treatable, but I’m afraid to say, not fully reversible. I know that’s not what you want to hear. But there are things we can do to get some of it back.”
 
I shrugged. It was something.
 
She said we’d have to confirm with a biopsy, but she’d had a lot of experience with cases like mine. “Often these things are triggered by stress,” she said. Have you had any major life events or illnesses in the last six months or so?”
 
Well, I’d had surgery, I told her. And then was rushed to the emergency room in the dead of night after a hemorrhage. That was pretty scary. A couple months later, I watched my dad die. I didn’t tell her we turned off the machines. That I felt his last breath go out under my hand. But the memory stung my eyes. I blinked back hot tears. Then I’d served as PTA president of our school and spent a year run ragged, being degraded and used by nice white church ladies, something that left a deep, deep scar. My youngest sister, for whom I had… complicated feelings was in liver failure. And as the only viable family option, I had wrestled desperately with being her donor. But I would do it for my mother.
 
I stopped and scanned the doctor’s face. She looked taken aback.
 
“It’s fine,” I reassured her. “I got to ride in an ambulance!”
 
She shook her head, as if to say, there’s no need to people please here. “That’s a lot,” she said, finally. “For anyone.”
 
My shoulders started shaking and tears suddenly spilled down my face. I was mortified. But her kindness had breached the dam.
 
“Is it okay if I touch you?” she asked. I consented and she put her hand on my knee. And I sat there in a stranger’s office and grieved for what was gone forever. And also for my hair.