Raising An Alien: Mommy Pattern Baldness

One of the little known after-effects of childbirth is hair loss. From what I understand, there's a particular way it appears, in fact, a particular pattern. For some women, this might be a scary thing, but for me it wasn't that big of a deal.

I've always had thick hair. In fact, my hair has always been kind of insanely thick. Certain barrettes and hair-ties don't work for me. So when the pregnancy extra-thick hair kicked in, I didn't really notice (though apparently other people did). The only thing that bugged me was how HOT it made me. I was sweating constantly, so the weekend before kiddo was born, I cut my hair.

My new mommy pattern baldness!

It wasn't until kiddo was a couple months old that I started losing hair. Literally every time I ran my hand through my hair, I would pull out a little clump of strands. While this was slightly disconcerting, I read it might happen and so I was prepared. My only worry was having bald spots. Women with bald spots doesn't work very well. But of course, I did get something like a bald spot. I got baby hairs. Ha! And who knew they were called baby hairs for that reason? Certainly not me!

close up of the baby hairs

Still, I had to come up with a plan of action. My hair had grown out from the time I'd last cut it (in the last days of August) and I needed to come up with a way to cover my new bald spots and also deal with kiddo's new favorite activity - hair pulling. What to do? Time for a cut! I had been going back and forth as to what to do with my bangs. Originally I wanted to let them continue to grow out, but the grim fact staring back at me in the mirror was the fact that letting my bangs grow out was going to be incredibly inconvenient on a daily basis while trying to cover these goofy bald spots. I knew the spots would disappear with time, and I could always grow out any bangs in the long run, so I decided I was back to bangs. Layering my hair was going to make kiddo's grabbing handfuls of my hair a little easier to tolerate (also it would make styling REALLY easy).

There really was only one conclusion for me. So like always, I holed myself up in the bathroom and took the scissors to my dark locks (I'm not crazy, just cheap and very experienced). While cutting your own hair isn't something I'd recommend to everyone, it works for me, and thankfully this time, my new cut covered my baby hairs perfectly and also kept kiddo from yanking out additional chunks!