Balding, No More

The strangest side effect of the stroke has been, by far, that my hair has started to grow back.

I realized this in therapy one day, said it out loud then immediately caught the bald man in the room with me check the top of his head and frown. I felt bad for saying it.

Baldness tends to follow the male members of the mother's family. My grandfather was bald, and my uncle went bald suddenly, when he was out of work in Florida. I didn't see him for a few months then, BAM! - He aged thirty years overnight.

I never asked  him about it but I assumed it was due to stress, which was no problem for me since I had always led a relatively stress free existence. My roommate compared me to a cat once, but that was after he came home and found me in the floor on my back, absent mindedly batting at the dangly cord that opened and shut the blinds.

So it was a fair comparison.

At a party once, there was a woman going around giving free back rubs. When she got to me she was horrified.

"You have no tension at all," she said, as she backed away. Her voice quivered.

"No, I don't," I said and went back to my conversation with, I think it was, a recently divorced woman who called herself Cat.

"What's it like to be divorced?" I asked.

She seemed stunned by the question, and the conversation quickly ended.

Anyway, the point is, my life was stress free, and I kept a square hairline into my late twenties. I considered it a badge of shame.

I had one friend who started going bald in high school. He could drink anywhere he wanted without being carded and go see whatever band he wanted. The last time I saw him he was drunk in Tally Ho at three in the morning playing video poker.

But the point was, he was bald.

Last spring I noticed my hair was starting to thin out on top, and I proudly announced it on Facebook. My friend Kimber wanted to see a picture, but when I tried to take a photograph I couldn't  take one where you could tell I was going bald. I stood on the patio until the sun went down but couldn't get a decent picture. After the sun went down I kept trying with the flash and when I got up the next morning, I failed some more.

But I was going bald.

I can remember the  first time I sunburned on the top of my head. It annoyed me but quietly I considered it a triumph.

Okay, it wasn't quietly and I didn't keep it inside, but no one else seemed to care.

The balding steadily got worse until I started to worry. What would I look like bald? How should I wear my hair? My father's friend, Dawkins, had a flat top haircut when he went bald and it looked very distinguished. On the other hand I worked at summer camp with a man who wore his long, with the bald head on top (basically a Benjamin Franklin) and it looked horrible.

But alas, my bald spot is gone.

Last week when I was at my sister's commencement, I was looking at all the bald heads in the room and feeling guilty. My hair grew back. I had waited years for my hairline to recede and now I was back to square on.

My theory is whatever stress caused the stroke was also making my hair fall out, and when I had the stroke, the stress dissipated and my hair grew back, but that's just a theory.

But the truth is I still feel guilty, whether I deserve a bald spot or not. And maybe if I feel guilty enough my hair will start to fall out again.

If I'm lucky.