A Cup of Hair

Every morning I pull a hand full of hair (literally) out of my tub drain. One morning I thought, "Oh my gosh! It's a cup of hair!" Disgusting, right? I agree. Let me back up and explain. I have always "lost" a lot of hair. Being that I have pretty thick hair, it falls out quite a bit, always has. It was quite scary one night when I was ten and watching a TV movie with my mom. I watched in horror as the lady was in the shower started pulling out clumps of her hair. She had cancer, but what I failed to hear was her hair was falling out because of chemo, not just because she had cancer. So, for about a week, I thought I had cancer. I finally, tearfully, had the courage to ask my mom about it and was so relieved that I wasn't dying. Another much lighter thing happened when I was in high school. My parents housekeeper would say, "Whoever lives upstairs in the teal bathroom sure looses a lot of hair. She should get that looked at." Well, I did and my hair just grows REALLY fast and I lose a lot in the process. Move up 10 years to this past January.

I was well into my pregnancy...just hit 20 weeks. I started noticing that I wasn't pulling ANY hair out of the tub drain. Weird. I also realized that I didn't have to clean my hairbrush. I researched it and found out that during pregnancy, some women's hormones make it so that your hair is really strong and grows in thick and you might not lose as much. Cool...it was the nicest 6 months of my hair's life. Not only was it thick, shiny, and healthy, but I wasn't shedding like my cat in the middle of summer. I totally enjoyed this luxury....until....

Enter Elias and 2 months after giving birth....hair and lots of it falling off of my head. The first time that I noticed, I looked down at our tub's drain, I actually gasped. A swirl of long brown hair twirled together, looking something like a big brown bug. I realized it was my hair and cleaned it out. I slowly started noticing that my previously clean hair brush was now littered with my post-pregnancy hair. All that lush thick hair was now falling out...not slowly, but really fast. Cups and fistfulls of hair now plague my life. A couple of weeks ago I thought I would try to help the situation by cutting off 3 inches. It didn't really help, now I just find my shorter hair everywhere.

My husband is also annoyed with my sloughing off. I get in the shower after Dallas has taken a bath and it is like Hair Art on the shower wall. He pulls out my long hair from his bath water and sticks them to the wall. Elias has even fallen victim. Dallas pulled a long hair out of our son's mouth one morning last week. I have also found my hair in his crib, on his skin, and in his diaper...YIKES! I have a horrible nightmare of one of my hair's wrapped tightly around his penis. I do have a reason for that...it happened to my nephew with one of my sister-in-law's hair. He was crying hard for no reason until they stripped off his clothes only to find one of her hair's cutting off circulation to his penis!! OH MY GOSH...what a horrible thing! So I frequently check my son's penis to make sure this isn't the cause of his discomfort. (Do I get props for using penis 3 times in a blog?)

I don't see any slowing to this process. Maybe since I didn't have any hair fall out for 6 months, it will take 6 months for it to fall out. I have 4 months to go. My only solutions to this nuisance would be to get pregnant again or shave my head. Not gonna happen...