Any woman in the throes of pregnancy will be happy to point out that during this miraculous forty weeks, their hair gets much thicker, more luxurious, and grows more quickly than ever before. Pregnancy books always include this little morsel of information for first time moms looking for a bright spot amidst the ten month sea of vomit and back pain. What seems to be an undiscussed portion of this particular change in the woman’s physical realm, is where the hair goes after the birth. The answer? Everywhere.
I began to notice it when my son was a month old. Stray hairs began to appear on the kitchen counter, the foot of the bed, and the dashboard of the car. Hair materialized near the toaster, the fax machine, and the houseplants. Long hairs wrapped around my car keys, curled up in the wells of my contact lens case, stuck halfway deep in the open tube of toothpaste.
Four months into my angelic son’s little life, our house was enveloped in hair. It was as if the strands had a collective consciousness and were drawn by magnet to the places we held most hygienically dear. I couldn’t escape the feeling, at times, of being watched.
My wife’s final follicle-filled shower found her plowing through her tresses with a fine toothed comb, vigorously swirling large resultant wads on the wet wall of the shower to mark the downfall of her thick, shiny mane. As I passed by the clear curtain, I jumped at what I thought to be a small otter plastered to the side of the tub, ready to do evil furry otter things. She turned the water off, picked up the large lump of hair carcass, plopped it in the small garbage can under the sink, and sighed a deep sigh of satisfaction.
Aside from a replacement drive belt for the vacuum, there are no remnants of our Poltergeist-ish encounter with one of the dark sides of pregnancy. The endless locks that infiltrated our poor home with their many tentacles have receded somehow into the void. I can be sure, however, that during the pregnancy period of our second child, any even comical mention of hair growth will rob me of a little sleep that night.