Hair-Razing Tales

Being the kind of person who likes to prepare for the worst even while hoping for the best, I knew that with the particular chemo cocktail that my bartender...I mean oncologist...had concocted, that my hair would fall out two-three weeks after my first dose. I also had read enough accounts of women being traumatized by finding half their heads' of hair on their pillows to know that I wanted less hair falling out. That's what led to the vixie cut--less hair to be on the pillow. At about day 10 post chemo I started doing the tug test...pulling on my hair and seeing if any came out. On the day before I was to leave on retreat, I "failed" the tug test. I had bought a hair-trimming razor thingy in preparation of when my hair was really coming out and packed it just in case.

On retreat with me were seven other women who had either had cancer or are living with cancer. I was the only one who had not done chemo before and I believe that all of them had gone through the experience of losing all their hair. We were supported in our work and restoration by a team of ten women that included counsellors with decades of experience, a palliative care doctor, massage therapist, professional musician and art therapist.

I realized that I could not be in a better place to have an "embaldening ceremony" which is what is going on in the first two photos. I was given free rein as to the particulars of the ritual and I requested that photos be taken, that anyone who wanted to be there was welcome and that I wanted Burning Down the House* to be played at full volume. The reason that I am laughing in the first photo is that all the other participants were dancing to the music in front of me. The second photo shows one of the team shaving my head and the third shows the results of a second pass with the razor.

I had warned Charlotte and Zack that I might come home bald. I was resting upstairs when Charlotte came home from school. She came running upstairs to see me and with her usual aplomb didn't even flinch when she saw her bald-headed Mama. After hanging out for a bit, she suggested that I try on my wig...that's me, Zoё as a redhead, in the last photo.

I was downstairs with wig when Zack came home...I whipped off the wig to show him my bald head and after a few moments of reflection he said that he thought he liked me bald even more than as a redhead.

I have two truly awesome kids. I have given them such a different life than the consciously-raised, attachment-parented, family-bed-ed, demand-nursed ideal that I had so desperately wanted to provide them with. I had plans to be the perfect mother (what is that saying about "If you want to make God laugh...) but the distance that I have fallen from that now-obviously unattainable ideal is breathtaking. And yet...Zack and Charlotte have developed the ability to take pretty much anything in stride, they have their feelings but they move on, and while I would never consciously construct such a path for them, they have developed a matrix that will serve them well in their lives. What doesn't kill us--truly--makes us stronger. And while I failed dismally to create the safe sanctuary I had envisioned for them, they know--in every cell of their bodies--that they are loved.

*Burning Down the House is the only song that I have downloaded on my IPOD, though there are a few others thanks to Zack's insistence that it's just plain wrong to have dozens of audiobooks and just one song on an IPOD no matter how old its owner is.