Dr. Patricia Sullivan

My husband’s ex-wife cut my hair

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My husband's ex-wife cut my hair. In her kitchen. With the big light on. She's the only person who has seen the top of my head since androgenetic alopecia. Not my husband. Not my mother. Not my own daughter. Her. Let me back up. Renee was Tom's first wife. Married at 24, done by 28, no kids, twenty years before me. She cuts hair at the salon on the main street. I've driven past it every day for twenty years and never once walked in. We're civil. Cards She came to Tom's dad's funeral and hugged me, and I thought what I always think when I see her, which is that her hair is better than mine. It's a thick grey-blonde bob and she flips it when she laughs. Of course it's good. She does it for a living. I used to say Tom had a thing for hair. His first wife did it for a living. His second wife had enough of it for two people. That was funny for exactly as long as I had the hair. I'd been the girl with the hair since I was nine. It took two stylists to blow it out. I lost bobby pins in it. My mother used to say I got all the hair in the family and she'd been shortchanged, and I thought that was a joke until I was 41. Tom told me on our second date it was the first thing he'd noticed about me. He was standing behind me at a bar. He said it to the back of my head. Here's the thing I didn't understand until it was going. It's never about the hair itself. My hair was how I felt about myself before anyone said a word to me. I walked into rooms with it. And when it started disappearing, I stopped recognising the person in the mirror. Lily was 13 the first time. She was up a stepladder putting up decorations and she looked down and said, Mum, you've got a bald bit. The way you'd tell someone they had spinach in their teeth. I said, do I? Then I went upstairs and took the first of 1,140 photos of my own scalp. 1,140. Bathroom light. Car mirror. The gym. The bathroom at a funeral, once. I could have told you the shed count of any given day the way other women know their step count. I ran my fingers through it a dozen times a day to see what came out. Tom started calling my phone the scalp cam. That was funny for about a month. The dermatologist was kind about it. Androgenetic alopecia. Genetic. Progressive. She said it's not going away on its own. She said we could slow it, and she wrote a prescription I'd take every day for the rest of my life, with side effects I'd already read about at 2am. I said I'd think about it. It's still in my bag. I rang my mother from the car. She said, your Aunt Peggy went through the same thing. She just learned to live with it. And I understood for the first time that in my family this isn't a problem. It's a stage of life. Like reading glasses. So I did what you do. Biotin. The gummies. The $88 bottle everyone on Instagram takes. The rosemary oil I ordered twice. A scalp facial that cost more than my car insurance. I did the maths on a napkin once. Just under $3,600 in three years. And the part got wider on schedule anyway. The dermatologist had suggested minoxidil as well. I picked up a bottle at the pharmacy, read the back, and put it down again. It's mostly alcohol. I wasn't putting that on my scalp twice a day forever. Then I read about it properly that night. The itching. The flaking. The hair that turns up on your face instead. And the day you stop, the shedding comes back worse than before. So I never started. After that I did what Peggy did. I made peace with it. I cancelled the dermatologist. I stopped the photos. I told anyone who asked that I was fine, and I mostly believed me. I wasn't angry. I just wanted to give up. I said it to Tom one night. “I think this is just who I am now” And he said, okay love, in the voice you use for someone who's finally being sensible. Everyone was so relieved. My sister said she was proud of me. Here's what nobody tells you about making peace with it. It feels exactly like getting better. You sleep. You stop checking. You get your afternoons back. It's the best you've felt in two years, and that is the whole problem. Because I hadn't made peace with anything. I'd made an arrangement. And the arrangement needed nobody to look. I set my alarm for 5:40 so my hair was done before Tom's eyes opened. Lamps off before he came up. He used to twist my hair round his finger on the couch. I moved his hand, every time, with an excuse, until he stopped putting it there. Neither of us ever said a word about that. We stopped going to my mother's for lunch. Her kitchen has a skylight. Lily and I used to do each other's hair on the weekend. I stopped. I said I was too tired. Three years of too tired. And I hadn't been to a hairdresser in three years. Think about what a hairdresser does. She stands above you. So I cut my own hair over the bathroom sink with the kitchen scissors, back to the mirror. I changed every lightbulb in the house. Every one, down to the dimmest bulb the hardware store sold. Tom thinks I'm saving money. He's mentioned it to people as a good thing about me. Then Tom's mum turned 80. Big party. Everyone. Renee too, because Renee and Tom's mum stayed close the way ex-wives and mothers-in-law sometimes do, which I've never fully forgiven either of them for. I decided, for once, to try. I'd cut in some layers myself the night before. For lift. Nine o'clock. Bathroom. The dim bulb I'd put in. I took too much off one side. I evened it up. I took too much off the other. Then there was a chunk. I was standing there holding a piece of my own hair, and because I'd pulled it all wrong I could see my scalp in the mirror properly for the first time in months. I sat down on the edge of the bath. Tom knocked. I said I was fine. He said he could hear me not being fine. I got a towel on before he came in. He never saw the top. He saw the scissors, and the hair on the counter, and my face. He sat on the closed toilet lid for a long time and didn't say anything. Then he said, Renee could fix that. I said every no there is. He let me finish. Then he said, she's the one hairdresser in this town who'll keep her mouth shut about your hair, because she's got as much reason as you to not want it talked about. That's what got me in the car. Not kindness. Leverage. Half past nine at night. Her back door. She'd pulled a kitchen chair out and put a towel over it, and there was a cape on the table she'd brought home from the salon. I stood in the doorway in a scarf. She said, sit down, love. I've got the big light on because I need to see. I'm going to see it. That's the deal. I sat. I took the scarf off. She stood above me and put her hands on the top of my head and went quiet. Three years since anyone had touched the top of my head. And it was my husband's first wife. She said, how long. Three years. Does he know. He does now. Her hands stayed there. Then she said, mine started at 46. I'm 51. I looked up at that bob. The one I'd been quietly jealous of since before Lily was born. She said, it's mine. All of it. Wasn't, for a couple of years. I'll tell you what I did while I sort this out. She'd done the same list I did. Same bottles. Same napkin, probably. Then a trichologist explained to her what was actually happening, and she said it was the first time any of it made sense. She's not a doctor. She said that twice. This is how it was explained to her. Every woman has a hormone called DHT. When you're younger, your estrogen sits around each hair follicle like a shield, and DHT can't get near it. In your forties that shield starts thinning. And if you've got the genes for this, which is what androgenetic alopecia means, your follicles are sensitive to DHT in a way other women's aren't. So DHT gets in. And it shrinks the follicle. Slowly. The hair that grows out of a shrinking follicle is finer. Then shorter. Then one day it isn't there. That's why it's the top and the crown and the temples. That's why you can see through it under a bright light. That's why the elastic goes round three times now, and then four. And here's the part that made me put my hand over my mouth in her kitchen. It doesn't stop when you stop looking at it. Every week I'd spent making peace with it, it had been making progress. Biotin doesn't touch DHT. The gummies don't touch DHT. Minoxidil widens blood vessels, that's all it does. It doesn't touch DHT either. I'd spent three years feeding hair that something was shrinking from underneath. Most of what's sold as a hair supplement was never built to deal with the actual hormone. She said, you didn't do anything wrong. Nobody told you. Then she told me what she takes. Two things, together. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto. The way it was explained to her, they do two different jobs. Pumpkin seed oil turns down how much DHT your body makes in the first place. Saw palmetto stops the DHT that's already there from getting into the follicle. One turns down the supply. One guards the door. You need both. And you need them at the doses that were actually in the trials, or you're paying for a nice idea. She'd bought them separately off Amazon first, like I would have. She said don't. It's either one or the other, or it's both at doses that don't do anything, and then you decide it doesn't work and you go back to making peace. She'd found one that has both, at the proper dose, cold-pressed so the oil still does what it's meant to. She wrote it on the back of a salon appointment card. Bloom & Bond. She said, I've had four women in my chair with your exact crown. Two of them started this. I can see the difference from up here. Then she sorted my hair out. Shorter than I wanted. But she did something with it. Then she handed me a hand mirror and held another one behind me, the way they do. Look, she said. I hadn't looked at the back of my own head in three years. I looked. Right, she said. Now you know what you're working with. Now we can do something about it. I got through the party. Tom's mum said the cut was very smart. Renee was across the room and caught my eye once and did the smallest nod anyone has ever done. Nobody else knew. I've thought about that nod a lot. I ordered it that night. I took the card to my own dermatologist first, because I'm not Renee and I wanted a doctor to say it. She read the label, said the two ingredients made sense for what I have, and had no objection. Ask yours the same. It takes two minutes. I want to be honest with you, because I'm writing to a woman I don't know. It didn't work overnight. The first two weeks, nothing. I'd read enough to expect that. Renee had said, come back in six weeks, I'll tell you from up here. So that was my deadline. Not the mirror. Her. Around week three, the drain. I rinsed the shower out and there wasn't the usual dark knot to pull from it. I didn't trust it. Around week six, the brush. I'd shoved it in a drawer months before so I'd stop looking at it. I pulled it out and pulled it through once and it came out nearly clean, and I stood there holding it longer than a woman should stand holding a hairbrush. Week six, Renee's chair. Hands on my head. Quiet. Then, it's slowed. Keep going. Month three, the part. Under the worst light in the house. A fuzz of tiny hairs standing straight up along the line, right where it had been widening. Bodies are different. Some women notice things sooner than that, some later. I'm telling you my weeks, not yours. Month four, I put the old bulbs back in. Tom noticed. He didn't say anything. He just started leaving the kitchen light on. And one night I was at the counter under it, and he came in behind me and put his hand on the top of my head, and left it there. I didn't move it. That was the first time my husband saw the top of my head. Four months after his first wife did. Then there was a dinner. Fourteen people, pendant lights over the table, the kind of thing I'd have had a migraine for a year ago. I got in the car afterwards and realised I hadn't thought about it once. Nobody had said anything about my hair. Nobody noticed anything. But I felt the difference. I just felt like myself again. A few weeks ago Lily sat behind me on the bed with the brush, the way we used to. She didn't say anything. There was nothing to say. I go to Renee every six weeks now. The salon. The one on the main street I drove past for twenty years. She puts her hands on the top of my head and goes quiet, and then she says, there we go. I thought I was hiding my hair. I was hiding from the three people who'd have helped me in a night. And it took the one woman I'd never let near me to turn the light on. I wasn't at peace. I was tired. Those aren't the same thing, and everyone around me was too relieved to notice the difference. Three generations of women in my family gave up their hair at fifty and called it living with it. It didn't have to be me. If you're reading this and you've made peace with it. If you've stopped the photos and cancelled the appointment and told everyone you're fine, and it feels like getting better. Please hear this from someone who did all of that. It isn't better. It's just dark. And the follicles you've still got are the ones this is for. Not the ones that have gone. The ones that are still deciding. Picture six weeks from now. You rinse the shower and there's nothing to pull out. Three months from now you're standing under a bad light and you don't flinch. Four months from now someone puts a hand on the top of your head and you leave it there. You don't have to choose between living with it and being on something for the rest of your life. Bloom & Bond is a small company, and they sell out often because they use full clinical doses, not the diluted amounts you find elsewhere. Right now they have a buy two get one free offer running. If this sounds like where you are, it's worth looking into. Link below. 👉 https://trybloomandbond.com/products/new-pumpkin-seed-oil-softgels P.S. Renee, if you're reading this, and you probably are because Tom's mum sends you everything. Thank you. Your hair is still better than mine. Give me six months.