As many people have reported, following Covid, I started losing my hair.
Add to this a splash of Anemia, to make matters worse.
(I can’t just have one kind of fun, after all)
I have been battling this for over a year.
Once I had spent months on regular supplements, and a strict regimen of rosemary oil applied feverishly to my scalp, I started seeing it growing back in.
I was thankful to see proof of it working, because those oil treatments had meant that for months I had looked like Gollum for half an hour each day, hunching along to the corner of the sofa to wait as the oil soaked in.
My teenagers had made valiant efforts to avoid directly looking directly at, and making faces at this entire process.
They had failed miserably.
When I had seen them looking, and explained why my hair looked like three Charlie Brown wisps,
my sixteen year old had said the confidence boosting,
“Oh. I thought you just finally gave up on washing your hair.”
Now that it has started working, however, what appears to be growing in are wiry white spikes everywhere.
These spikes make me appear to need someone to speak to me in a soft voice,
or some form of assistance; Some private room circle of chairs.
The other morning, fresh off of doing all that I could to fix myself – creams, salves, ointments, sprays, and a quick whispered prayer – I stood looking in the mirror, and there they were, refusing to ever lay flat no matter how I beg.
I pictured them with blue painted faces, fists in the air, on their tiny horses.
My little Bravehearts of Hair.
Me: like some sort of whispered about medicine woman that stays in the forest, wearing only pelts.
“If you need potions, you must go to her cave bearing three emerald stones that you will present to her.”
I squinted at those hairs for a long time, and you know what?
The whole thing started to feel increasingly unfair.
I am already the age of perimenopause that has me either hot, irritated, crying, or plotting ways to leave my entire family and start fresh in the Witness Protection Program somewhere.
My skin is creping.
Despite my giant water bottle, hauled everywhere I go, (which is yet another reason for my family to roast me) like the desert floor,
it looks like it’s never even heard of water.
Every time I stand, I feel some painful injury that never even happened, then just as fast as it came on it disappears.
For 15 minutes today I limped around with a searing pain in the top of my foot,
but once those 15 minutes were up, as if a timer went off, I was able to walk like nothing ever happened, perfectly healed.
Just completely crippled one minute, and able to go for a brisk jog the next, possibly with some jumping jacks thrown in. No rhyme or reason.
Then there is the fact that while women are at this age,
many of us simultaneously have pre-teens or teenagers.
Who planned THAT timing?!
People talk about the questions they’ll ask God about one day – all the questions of the universe.
I plan to ask Him what on earth He was thinking pairing those two absolute hormonal atomic bombs together.
You know what goes best with a hot flash, friends?
I don’t know either, but it’s definitely absolutely anything but a teenager.
What’s worse than feeling like you’re on the surface of the sun?
Being on the surface of the sun while you have to defend every single decision you’ve ever made and you drive in circles.
Have you ever tried not looking your best around a pre-teen/teen girl?
I once had one gesture in a circle towards my face after I had some pre-cancerous cells burned off, and had her ask me when my nose was “going to stop doing that,”
as if my skin cancer scare was really harshing her flow.
And don’t even think of taking one into a dressing room with you unless you like reviews such as,
“Who Wore it Best? You, or a French’s Mustard bottle?”
My skin now reacts to everything.
I spent the last month with an eyelid rash.
(Please, feel free to picture that with the hair)
It turns out I am reacting to sunscreen now, because of course I am.
I have tried to protect my skin for my entire life, and, in return, it would like me to know that, frankly, it just doesn’t care.
What I thought was my lower back hurting because I slept wrong has now lasted approximately 36 months.
Either that was one heck of a slumber that one fateful night, or this is just my fated existence now:
Eat, breathe, sleep on ice packs.
It’s gotten to the point where I’m just annoyed at any article boasting any mid-life cure or hack because I have tried it all, yet, still I somehow look like I live under a bridge eating a pile of bones.
All I can say is, to any of you still in your 20’s or 30’s, I hope that you really live it up.
Take the pictures. Buy the T-shirt.
Enjoy your regulated body temperature, and your absence of a muffin top.
Enjoy the winged eyeliner that doesn’t ever fork because of your laugh lines so it looks like you drew on a snake’s tongue.
Enjoy the skin that doesn’t require a huge bin of creams under your bathroom sink, and a medical degree worth of knowledge about every single one.
Enjoy the hair that doesn’t give you the same silhouette as a dried up dandelion puff.
Enjoy every moment before you are looking in your mirror one day, waiting for the villagers and their flaming torches to come.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
