I Think I Might Be Losing My Hair
But I’m too scared to find out for sure
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My mid-life crisis really happened when I was 16 years old, and it’s the only milestone in my life I’ve actually completed ahead of schedule.
I finished school late. Married late. Had kids late. Stopped having kids late.
But looking in the mirror one morning in the mid-1980s, I noticed a single grey hair growing on the top of my head, and I immediately pulled it out.
My parents told me later that ‘early greying’, and even baldness, is a hereditary thing. My grandfather and some of my uncles had lost their hair at a young age, they said.
“Lucky me” to be born into this follicly challenged gene pool.
My mom, a young wife who was fond of old wives’ tales, instructed me not to touch them. “Don’t pull them out! You’ll get more!”
But I didn’t listen. I pulled them out, and sure enough, I got more.
So many more, in fact, that by the time I was in my late 20s and early 30s, people would often compliment me on my “salt and pepper” hair.
So many more that, one morning when I was trimming my mid-90’s Eddie Vedder/Brad Pitt goatee, I even noticed a single short white fleck of stubble sticking out from under my chin.
So many more that, by the late 2000s, my girlfriend (now my wife) bought a box of hair dye, and experimented on me with “true black” hair color.
That Sunday, I went from mostly salt with some pepper, to all pepper with no salt, in the span of about 30 minutes.
The transformation was unsettling.
The next morning, my unsuspecting boss visited me and my jet black hair at my cubicle, and he nearly spat out his coffee.
They say “once you go black, you never go back.” They were wrong. I couldn’t go grey fast enough after that.
I had to come to terms with the fact that the glory days of my completely black hair were gone. My hair was now a beautiful mixed-race union of black and white.
Until it wasn’t.
Nowadays, it’s more white than black. Younger men have started holding doors open for me. They’ve started calling me “sir.” Those jerks.
I still have the body and mind of a 20-year-old. OK, maybe a late 30’s-year-old. How dare they guess the truth of my age based solely on the color of my hair?
And then, over the course of the last few years, I’ve begun to suspect another phase of this slow and steady decay: hair thinning.
Maybe a few more hairs left in my hairbrush. Maybe a few more strands in my bathroom sink.
But let me tell you, I can neither confirm nor deny that my hair has thinned.
I refuse to Sherlock Holmes this mystery as I’m really not interested in finding out the truth. I’m quite content to fool myself, to cover up any seemingly visible scalp lackings with the lies of hair from a completely different area on my head.
With the onset of male pattern baldness, I understand that most men can expect a mid-life crisis. But as I said at the beginning, I already went through that when I was 16.
Some men buy sports cars or boats. They get hair implants. They take Viagra pills. They get divorced and date young women.
All in a desperate attempt to hold onto their youth.
Not me.
Nonetheless, my greying hair may act as a red flag to some people.
There comes a time in every married man’s life, for example, when their wife will inevitably question whether they are going through some sort of mid-life crisis.
For me, that happened last night.
It was probably payback for those times when I’ve innocently inquired, during an argument about some trivial matter, whether she was going through PMS or menopause.
We were trying to decide what to eat for dinner last night, and I suggested that we should order take-out food, to celebrate the end of a busy week.
The kids would be excited when we told them.
It was a deal.
And then it wasn’t. She changed her mind, as she sometimes does.
“Let’s just eat the fish we have in the fridge”, she suggested.
She’s on this health kick where she only wants to eat homemade food.
I was disappointed, and so I kind of sulked, silently.
She noticed, but she wasn’t sure what it was all about.
We ate dinner, and you know what? The fish was bloody delicious.
But by then, I had already been sulking for a few hours and it was too late to stop.
“Is everything OK?”, she said later.
It was, but I was in one of those funks where, despite the fact that everything turned out fine, I couldn’t shake the dark cloud hanging over my head.
“It’s fine,” I replied, and we watched some TV and went to sleep.
And when I woke up the next morning, I apologized to her for my moodiness, as we were brushing our teeth in the bathroom.
“I thought you were going through some type of mid-life crisis,” she remarked.
No, I thought, as I stared down at the few strands of hair that had just floated down into the sink.
I just really wanted take-out food.
Definitely not a mid-life crisis.
