hair today...

I'm losing my hair. Every morning I brush it and pull out a handful of strands; more litter the shower drain, and still more drift up against the walls of the bathroom, forming into little tumbleweed-like balls if I let them go too long.

I still have a lot of hair on my head, but it's noticeably thinner than in my luxuriant twenties and thirties. I've always had thick, wavy hair--once, years ago, it was characterized as my only good feature. (The speaker, a fellow 7th-grader, quickly revised her words to "best feature," but I heard and remembered.) I've always been pretty vain about my hair, and the post-partum hair loss shocked and worried me both times. But this time it never stopped. Since Nick was born, almost six years ago, I've been losing hair steadily. Now, some days I can see my scalp even where my hair isn't parted.

My hairdresser reassures me, "you have fabulous hair." My doctor ran some thyroid tests that all came back fine. Mark tells me I've always worried about losing my hair when really he's the one in trouble. And, well, he's right--his male-pattern balding trumps my anxiety any day. But then, he's a guy, and guy's don't worry about their hair, right? Mark has taken the middle-aged guy solution du jour, and shaved what's left down to about a quarter inch. It looks good on him, and it's fun to rub his head. He recently shaved off Nick's curls, too, and Nick's sleek little half-inch crew cut looks adorable. But I'm not going there. I'm surreptitiously checking out ayurvedic solutions to hair loss, googling hair loss and thyroid (those tests were a few years ago, after all), reading shampoo labels--and, most of all, checking out the back of my head in the mirror more often than seems quite normal.

It's pure vanity, I know. I try to tell myself I'm just listening to my body, trying to hear what it has to tell me--but right now what it has to tell me is that I'm aging, and I don't want to hear that. I start bargaining--I'll take grey hair, as long as it's full! I won't color it again! I'll take wrinkles as long as I have hair! But apparently I don't get to choose. Yet another lesson in acceptance that I'm not quite ready for.

Maybe it's time for Rogaine?