Why I felt pressured to put a headband on my bald baby
My toddler was waiting to ride a carousel at the mall when a stranger approached us and asked a question that left me reeling.
?Your little girl is beautiful. Does she have cancer"? The man reached into his pocket, as if he wanted to donate some change to us.
I looked at my daughter, then back at him, confused. ?Oh?no! She is just really bald,? I laughed.I smiled as hard as I could. I didn?t want the poor guy to feel any more awkward than he already did. He nodded and backed away. My one-year-old rode on Clifford the Big Red Dog a couple of times and we continued our shopping.
But I kept circling back to the man?s assumption. I was accustomed to hearing a lot of mostly rude remarks about my daughter?s lack of hair. But I had never heard the c-word before. That shook me. A great many babies go through a bald phase. In fact, it?s a common and healthy thing for both infants and their mothers to lose a significant amount of hair in those months following birth, due to a combination of genetics and postpartum hormones.
My daughter entered the world with lots of dark brown peach fuzz covering her head. Within two months, it was completely gone, except for a ring of hair around the bottom of her head, which made her look like a baby George Costanza. (We even considered dressing her up as George for her first Halloween.)
I also lost handfuls of hair in those early months, so much that there was always a dark layer of it on our bathroom floor. I started mopping daily. My...
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