I’m running of out styling tricks
I’m losing my hair, and I’m scared.
Thanks to Sarah F. of the Substack, “Might I Suggest,” for giving me the courage to write this post
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In 1988, when my nonna was on her death bed, she said,“Inside, I still feel like a young woman.” It registered with me, but barely. I was young and full of sap, and she was emaciated and losing her auburn hair from a prolonged battle with cancer. Her eyes were the same light brown they had always been, like honey shot through with sunlight. Just like mine.
I inherited those eyes but not her thick beautiful hair. I don’t know who passed down the gene for hair loss, but I have it. In the past ten years, I have lost 90 percent of the soft chestnut hair that I took for granted as a young woman. It was fine but abundant and took forever to style. In junior high school, I didn’t cut it for three years so I could grow the tapered ponytail my mother (who had tons of thick black hair) threatened to chop off because it looked “like a rat’s tail” (another story for another day).
What I wouldn’t give now for even ten percent of the hair I have since lost…not for a ponytail, but for some growth to cover the deserts between the shrinking oases of hair that remain.
I give myself five more years before I am bald. What then? I am not like those young beautiful models with chiseled features whose hairless heads accentuate big eyes or lithesome curves.
It’s hard to think of myself as womanly without hair.
I’m scared.
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The first time I faced the existential crisis of being a woman sans hair—and that’s how it feels, like a crisis—was ten years ago, when I prepared for brain surgery. My beloved and I went into the bathroom and made a humorous clip of me shaving my head. I had decided I didn’t want to go into the operating room with hair and wake up without it.
I remember watching the feather-like locks of chestnut hair fall and accumulate on the floor and saying, “I have pretty hair!” as if I had just discovered the stuff growing out of my head since the day I was born.
My beloved told me I was beautiful no matter what and offered to shave his head in solidarity. I demurred. He was already mostly bald but bearded and very handsome. Looking at him reminded me I could attract that kind of man.
He died a year later, and I have been alone since then. I long for love and closeness; now and then I go on a date. But the intervals between outings gets larger and larger, in proportional to my hair loss.
The last time a prospective date commented on my appearance, it was to ask, unprompted,“What happened to your hair?”
I get it. Hair is connected to femininity, attractiveness, vitality.
The kicker: He was bald, but I felt ashamed.
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I am now sixty-three, but I still feel like a girl inside.
A girl who has been on a lifelong quest to look good. Or not to look bad, which has been my default as long as I can remember. I used to cry getting ready for grade school because children teased me for being chubby. In high school I was bulimic. In my early twenties, I exercised so much, I damaged my knees. Only after my son was born did I develop a bit of reverence for my body; he was a sick newborn, and breastfeeding was the thing that got him out of the neonatal intensive care unit. I learned what it is to love and be beloved without regard for appearance.
Now my goal is to look as vital as I can. And it is as much about appearance as it is health. I don’t aspire to be a lithesome model but a fairly in-shape older person who can hike and dance and go for bike rides. A person with well cared-for skin and teeth (I just got my braces off; no one tells you your teeth can shift as you age).
And hair.
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Like many or arguably most women, I have invested a ton of time exercising, dieting, eating healthy, and fighting the march of time. I’ve surrendered to what I call my Italian-girl butt, which I have decided is just the right size for my body (thank you, J-Lo). I also walk barefoot now, which I didn’t do for years because I thought my feet were ugly. They are not.
I am about the same size I was when my son was born 25 years ago. I fluctuate from a size six to a size eight, though somehow when I order clothing, I always choose “large.” The Melanie in my mind is the Venus of Willendorf.
I can crack that bad joke knowing that underneath it is despair. Just when I accepted my bum, I had to face a new reality: My hair is falling out and I am powerless to stop it. I can power-walk miles and lift weights; I can keep the wrinkles at bay with sunscreen; and I can brush and floss daily to keep my mouth cavity-free.
But I cannot stop losing my hair.
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Again, like many women, I have a wardrobe that encompasses four or five sizes, from size four, when I was losing weight during a custody case, to ten, when I gained weight during my convalescence from brain surgery.
I now also have an assortment of scarves, caps, hats, beanies, slouchy beanies, and head wraps (they don’t work on me), some bought in a panic and others, to try out, and still others, to protect my scalp from sunburn when I’m outdoors. Add to that two wigs (one of which is pictured above: “Silverstone,” is the color, says Wigs.com) that I kept out of about the ten I returned because I can’t pull off a Tina Turner. By that I mean that a person with fine hair cannot become, overnight, a person with a ton of hair. Or at least I cannot. I showed up for my 89-year-old father wearing a wig, and he didn’t know who I was.
All that clothing, all those coverings, as if I don’t know who I am.
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There’s a lot of shit going on in the world, and I am not vain. I think I can be more effective at facing that shit if I figure out how to live without hair.
Am I a wig person? In order to keep moving through this life with as much dignity and equanimity as possible, do I choose to don fake hair?
This question generates a kind of decision tree of further questions.
What happens when I show up at my job and my fine short brown hair has been replaced by a “silvertone” bob?
Do I say, “Hi, colleague! Do you like my new ‘do’?” or do I just ignore the obvious, that that person will likely notice: Mel is wearing a wig!
Do I wear a wig on the days I go to work and not wear one on the days I don’t? What do I do then? Cap, scarf, buzz cut, spray paint? (I know someone who does that.)
Do I tell a prospective date, “Just so you know, if we start taking things off, I might remove my wig”?
Another bad joke. But the idea of it makes me slightly queasy. Me, getting unclothed only to reveal a head of fuzzy, almost gone hair to some guy, not my beloved only to risk hearing, “Oh my god, you have no hair!”
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I don’t know why the idea of a wig, even the word itself, feels so yucky, so fake, so naked. An admission that my head is nearly denuded. A fear that people will know I’m wearing a wig and wonder if I have cancer. A fear that if I don’t wear a wig, all my flaws will look a hundred times worse without the softness of feminine tresses to mute them.
If I get a wig, do I have to get a styrofoam head to put it on at the end of the day? Or can I just throw it in a box like my favorite shoes? Are there environmentally friendly wigs? Are kids sewing wigs in a sweatshop somewhere? Can you recycle a wig?
What the fuck, Melanie, just put on a cap and be done with it, I think.
I know someone who does that, too.
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I wear many more “hats” than wigs. I have two graduate degrees. I teach at a major university and had an eight-year career at the Justice Department where I wrote talking points for elected leadership. I studied Arabic, French, and Italian and can get by in each language.
More important, I have beloved friends and family. I have achieved my dream of being published. I am mostly healed from a deeply traumatic early life and can celebrate my honesty, courage, and wisdom. My love for my students. The knowledge that I have given more than I have taken.
The beloved husband whose last words were “I love you,” a testament to an enduring bond and the comfort he derived from my presence. That knowledge alone is redemptive.
I can hold all that…and somehow, hold the fear of losing my hair, too.
Maybe because the girl and the young woman inside, the ones who hope and dream, who yearn for beauty and long for love, look through my eyes into the mirror and expect to see their hair.
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My insides and outsides don’t match.
Nanna understood. My beloved, had he lived, would have aged as a man whose insides and outsides didn’t match, and he too would have understood.
I miss him.
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Writing this has delivered me to the realization that, at bottom, losing my hair makes me feel unlovable. I know that’s utterly irrational. I also know that our society prizes unattainable beauty standards and that whether it is my Italian-girl butt, my feet or my abs, the hair loss anguish is more of the same irrationality.
And also not more of the same in the degree of futility I feel in fighting it. Knowing I have to accept it but grieving the loss it signifies. Wondering who I will be, who will cherish me, with or without hair. Wondering whether I am up to the task of loving myself no matter what.
For now, this insight is enough. It’s great to have so many scarves and hats to choose from, to get me through today.
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