5 months now. Five. Whole. Months. Holy moly.
Last I was looking back at pictures last night from when Dante was first born…just a few weeks old… just over a month old, and still just aging him by weeks… up until now. I was flashing back and forth between pictures from each ‘era’, and I cannot believe how much he’s changed in his mere 5 months, and I’m actually frightened by the prospect of him ‘getting older.’ He’s like a little old man now! Our very own Benjamin Button! And then some…
We’ve settled into a daily routine, which includes me incessantly picking my long hairs off of my shirts. Yup. I’m now dealing with postpartum hair loss. Not like, hair loss in the Rogaine sense, but enough so that I’m noticeably combing handfuls of hair out of my scalp after each shower. Now, I had read about this previously, but 3 months into post-baby body I thought “phew! Looks like I dodged that bullet,” when midway through the 4th month not only did my son seem to be shedding his own lustrous brunette baby locks, but I simultaneously started pulling out shred after shred of my own hair with each passing.
Hormonal change? I hear it’s estrogen levels returning to normal. Perhaps – I swear this all came about at the exact same time. But if there’s one thing that drives my OCD completely up the wall, it’s the feeling of a hair tickling the back of my arms because it’s precariously and stealthily clinging to the back of my t-shirt somewhere, like the leftover cobwebs of pregnancy. And I reach and swat, and I apply yoga poses, and strain to get my hands far enough back that I can grab at the offending hair of the moment; and with no luck I crane my head around to look in the mirror; and I comb my fingers through my tresses to counteract any future hangers-on… usually to no avail.
I cannot keep on top of it. It’s gotten to the point where I go as LONG as I can without washing my now-oily and desperately-in-need-of-a-highlight locks so that I don’t disturb any strands of hair which were thinking of making the leap to freedom in the near future. That – coupled of the fact that Dante can now grab a fistful of my hair into his vice-grip grasp, with the precision and will that only a 5-month-old can muster – has forced me into a life of mussy-headed hair-in-a-bun mommyhood. Add that to my wardrobe of sweatpants and tank tops which are easy to nurse in, and…. I have become one of THEM. (I can now see why many new moms chop their once glorious manes into a stereotypical short mommy-do. But, I will prevail!! I will not let it beat me.) I’m a sexy sexy beast, right Anthony?
I found some relief (as I often do) by Googling “Postpartum hair loss”, to which I found this from Parents.com: “No, you’re not going bald. This is a temporary phase. In the normal cycle of hair growth, some hair is lost every day. But during pregnancy the increased levels of estrogen in your body freezes hair in the growing (or “resting”) phase of the cycle. Hair that would normally fall out stays put, resulting in thicker hair. After you give birth and your estrogen levels decline, however, all that hair that was resting starts to fall out. This usually starts the third or fourth postpartum and ends by six months … But some women say it can last for a year. “
A year? Oh great, something new for me to worry about.
And our son? Where is he at with this? Oh, our cutie-patootie boy… his once-thick head of silky dark baby hair has been thinning in what, from a distance, resembles a mini George Costanza hair-ring of awesomeness. Up close, you can see his more permanent big-boy hair coming in underneath, but being that it’s blonder (for now), his hair looks so sweetly silly. And patchy. And Benjamin Buttony. And exactly what I would want it to look like for this phase, since I didn’t know what to expect in the first place. It is, in fact, perfectly coiffed.
