Hair at Three Months Post Partum


My baby became three months old a week or so ago. On cue my hair started falling out.
Hair, long dark strands. Hair, everywhere.
Hair, trails of it all over the house, the couch, the carpet, the Turkish rug in the den.
Inexplicable places, hair, on the cereal box of crunchy stuff. Hair, swirling in the laundry basket, stuffed with scented children's clothes and daddy-sized socks. Hair, on my toothbrush?
My bed, its white linens crumpled from the night before, a nest of rust and dark disbanded strands. Every morning I pick it up in handfuls, some of it in knotted clumps on my pillow case, toss in the trash, all that hair.
Sometimes hair will slip out of its designated follicle, down my shirt to agitate against my skin and shirt making me wild for a back scratch.
And the shower walls convey my state, hair displayed like modern artwork, running around the wash basin, cohesive by water and air.
My forefinger and thumb, pinch, and rotate like the cranes we see by the old viaduct, wrecking and building and rotating, my fingers pluck the hair found in weird places, but mostly everywhere, how I am not bald, I don't know.
I'm shedding, shedding, shedding as the pooled estrogen disappears through my body.
It's making me crazy to cut it all off.
To be a bright blond again.
But my husband tells me to relax. The brown is beautiful, the mane I've allowed to grow in wild trusses off my shoulders, inching towards my shoulder blades is doing something for him. Something he begs me to not interrupt.
And so, at nights, its he who brushes out my hair with  his fingers, repeated strokes on my scalp, gathering all those unneeded strands of rust and dark, clinging to his knuckles, stuffed about his carbon fiber wedding ring, a token of devotion not to my hair, but to the mysteries of me.

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