"Which way do you want your hair parted?" the stylist asks me as she stands poised above me with her comb.
I gesture with my hand, swooping the tangles of waves down and over to the right a little further than necessary.
"Against the cowlick?" she asks.
"It's to cover the bald patch," I tell her.
She doesn't ask and I don't offer an explanation as she starts to cut.
Strands of hair fall to the floor against the snip snip snip sound of her scissors, and I watch as they float down, remembering when I wrapped a length of that hair around my fingers and yanked.
My daughter was 2 months old the first time I pulled my own hair out.
I think that most people mean that figuratively, but nothing was figurative for me. Everything was starkly literal, from the black and white monitor screens that told us every time her heart stopped beating to the way I took that hair-pulling expression to the extreme.
She weighed 2 pounds, 8 ounces, a whole pound up from her birth weight, when they shaved a portion of her head to insert an IV. In my anxiety, I subconsciously twisted a strand of hair around my fingers and it pulled free from my scalp because of the stress and all those postpartum hormones. But then I reached up again and tugged, painfully and purposefully.
It didn't take long before we each had a small, round bare spot nestled in our hair, me and her. I meant to and I didn't mean to, all at the same time.
My husband found the discarded evidence in the bathroom trash can. "I meant to and I didn't mean to," I told him.
I talked to the counselor, who told me about post-traumatic stress disorder and how common it is in parents of extremely premature babies. I read the literature about healthy coping mechanisms. And then I pulled out a few more strands from underneath, where no one would see them missing, and tucked them in my back pocket so they wouldn't be spotted.
I didn't stop for an entire year.
We got healthy together. She learned to eat without a feeding tube and I learned how to focus through the fear every time her apnea monitor alarm went off to alert me that she had stopped breathing again.
She learned how to walk, even though they said she might not, and I learned how to do something else with my hands when I felt the anxiety set in.
She was bald until she was 2 years old, and then her hair grew in all around the scar just above her forehead. I stuck an oversized bow over her bald spot and self-consciously parted my hair over mine. Now I brush her hair out in slow, even strokes as she sits cross-legged on the floor in front of me. Then we switch places and she brushes mine. She puts three headbands and a tiara on my head, but I'm not hiding anything anymore.
Everyone always wants to know how things turned out for us, wondering what damage the extreme prematurity left in its wake. We talk about the physical and occupational therapy, the way she couldn't eat and the speech impediment and the asthma.
This, though, is the quiet affliction, the one that crept in and ensnared me when I was the most vulnerable. It lured me with its promise of letting me control something, anything, at a time when everything else was crumbling chaos. A reaction to standing by helplessly watching my baby struggle to live that lingered long after she left the hospital.
I knew which warning signs to watch for in her, the red flags they told us about in all of her therapies -- but I was completely unprepared to deal with what was happening to me.
Just like her birth, I never saw it coming.
So I talk about this part, too, the part about how prematurity had us all in its grasp.
Now she leaps off the couch and practices her painting on the hallway wall, and I only pull my hair out figuratively, because the both of us, we are healing.
