I started to try to write an essay about postpartum hair loss a few weeks ago. I gave birth 21 months ago and my hair is still falling out by the handful in the shower. I wanted to capture the indignity of this hair loss, and to explain how destabilizing it is to undergo hair loss on top of the many other bodily changes that accompany becoming mother. I wanted to confess my susceptibility to the beauty-industrial complex and explain how I ended up recently purchasing a hair growth supplement, Nutrafol, which my retired dermatologist mother-in-law was kind enough to not call snake oil, even though she implied as much. I thought this could be a Mother’s Day essay.

I realized I couldn’t write an essay about my relationship with my postpartum hair without admitting that my not-quite-straight/not-quite-curly hair has been a source of insecurity for the last 25 years. 2500 words about my relationship with my hair poured out of me into a draft which also included reflections on my mother’s relationship with her hair and my mother’s relationship with my hair (my hair is “messy” and needs a “comb through it”). I thought maybe this could be a Mother’s Day essay. But my feelings on my current draft are similar to my feelings about my hair—I haven’t quite figured out how to style it, it needs a trim, and it’s lacking some polish. I’m trying to accept that it won’t be ready by Sunday.

I got lost in old photos while reflecting on my relationship with my hair. I can’t see what I thought was wrong with it when I was in my teens and twenties. I remember feeling like it wasn’t long or straight or smooth enough. At my New England liberal arts college, the most desired girls had blonde or chestnut hair that air-dried perfectly straight in the dining hall after tennis practice. I struggled with the tension between the considerable effort my hair required to be passably straight, and the preppy culture’s implicit disapproval of anyone who tried too hard on her appearance. But the hair captured in the photos looks healthy and shiny. It didn’t fall out by the handful. I think it was beautiful.

I remembered that I used to believe my thirties would be a decade of great hair and great skin. I just had to make it through my twenties. I didn’t have anyone in my life who talked to me about what happened to your body when you had children. I had never heard the word perimenopause.

My very first draft of my postpartum hair loss essay followed my evolving relationship with washing my hair. I used to love taking showers. I felt most confident in my hair after taking a shower and freshly styling it. This changed after having a baby, when showers were often interrupted by a screaming baby who needed tit and washing my hair meant getting my hands coated in strands of hair. I can count on my hands the number of times that I have applied a heat styling tool of any kind to my head since having a baby.

I tried to calculate how much money I’ve spent on my hair since having a baby. It is too depressing to think about. It feels like I might as well have just stuffed that money in the bathroom wastebin along with my handfuls of hair.

I started to write something about how I’ve always made fun of the ubiquitous “mom haircut,” and how for years we made lovingly mocked my mom for her cropped hair in the early nineties. Now I look back at my mom, home alone with two kids under three all day, and am impressed that she has hair on her head. I feel so much empathy towards anyone who wants an easy wash-and-wear style that masks thinning.

I started to write about hair loss using the “is it postpartum or is it perimenopause?” motif. I thought about examining my current hair loss in the context of hypochondria. Maybe my daughter is a little bit too old for my hair loss to still be purely postpartum…

My husband asks if the takeaway of the essay I’m writing is that motherhood taught me that what my hair looks like doesn’t matter. I wrinkle my brow and wonder if my husband has ever met me. I wish that were the takeaway of my essay. I wish I had a takeaway.

I start to write about how maybe the reason I haven’t yet bought any Dyson hair tools is because I want to hold onto the fantasy for just a little bit longer that a Dyson will give me perfect hair.

I hesitate to write any of these essays for fear my daughter will read them one day, for fear she’ll convince herself that she isn’t beautiful. It looks like she has inherited my hair—dark blonde, straight on top, curly on the bottom. I think it’s beautiful. Somewhere in this fear could be a takeaway of a Mother’s Day essay—something about our biological inheritances and breaking cycles. And yet my Mother’s Day gift to myself was two new hair serums, arriving today.