Mother Nature knows how to kick a gal while she’s down. You’re a new mum, you are more sleep deprived than you thought humanly possible. You are slowly coming to terms with your new baby-centric responsibilities. You barely recognise yourself in the mirror.
And then your hair falls out.
It happens to the best of us. A quirk of pregnancy means that while the baby’s on board your hair is thick and luscious, but a few months after delivery it is coming out in handfuls.
Many mums, myself included, deal with this issue by going for the chop. A short bob is easy to manage while disguising the thin patches.
But according to the New York Times, the post baby bob, or “mom hair” is an abomination.
“You’ve likely seen it at suburban malls: the longer-in-back, slightly–shorter-in-front bob that should read sleek but is inescapably frumpy,” writes Bee Shapiro.
But while we can’t deny that motherhood might influence our choice of hairstyle, there is one question I’d like to pose – what is the male equivalent of ‘mum hair’?
New dads don’t shed hair in the same way that new mums do (unless they are tearing it out) but the arrival of a baby does bring about some huge lifestyle changes.
Perhaps the male equivalent of mum hair is the ‘dad bod’? As sported by celebrities such as Simon Cowell, Jason Segel and Leonardo DiCaprio. You don’t even need to be a dad to have a ‘dad bod’ – you just need “a cuddly torso and gentle paunch”.
(Of course the difference between ‘mum hair’ and the ‘dad bod’ is that former is seen as a negative thing to be avoided and the latter has been celebrated across the Internet.)
Maybe it’s the dad car? My husband was very glum about giving up his sporty Subaru in favour of a nice sensible family car.
While the ‘dad car’ is a bit more expensive than a haircut, it is an outward expression of something that has changed irreversibly. Everyone can see it and part of your identify has been replaced with something that screams parenthood.
Or maybe there actually is such a thing as ‘dad hair’? Receding hairlines, silver streaks and the old-fashioned number two all over are all looks sported by the dads I see at school pickup (all three of them). They are dads, they have hair – but is it ‘dad hair’?
Jokes aside, the tragedy of mum hair is that it is just another item on a long list of things that mothers are criticised for.
We are slated for our post-partum bodies, whether we breastfeed or not, whether we go back to work or stay at home and even how long it takes for our offspring to sleep through the night.
In fact, name any debate related to modern parenting and at the centre you’ll find a mum being blamed.
And there just isn’t a dad equivalent.
