A Pain In The Neck

Having a baby + getting old = time for a mild existential crisis

Some 20 months after the birth of my baby, my hair has finally stopped falling out.

‘Falling out’ does not sufficiently depict the great follicular exodus I experienced between Halloween ’23 and summer ’25; had I collected every brown (oh come now, grey) strand that fled my scalp during that period I am fairly certain I could, by now, have fabricated my toddler a pretty realistic human hair doll to rival her own weight. Almost a shame I didn’t, she’s currently very into baybees and this would have been quite a unique one for her to cart around Margate in a buggy, though certainly not the oddest sight to which one can bear witness in Cliftonville early on a Sunday morning.

Whether it’s simply time and distance from all those doolally pregnancy, postpartum and breastfeeding hormones that has at last stopped hair tumbling out of my head like Cheerios from a box, or things were helped along by all those Glowwa vitamins and all that Grow Me shampoo recommended by supportive mum friends - God bless you, every single bloody one - who experienced similarly frantic hair-based panics following childbirth, I cannot say. What I can say is that shedding an entire ponytail’s worth of hair isn’t the only way in which things have nosedived for me physically (and, occasionally, mentally) since having a child.