Warning: Photo of a Bald Lady Coming Up!

Now's your chance to look away if you would rather not be left with this image, but I've gotta tell you I'm feeling pretty good about it all, so I don't mind at all if you take a look!

Not that I would ever choose to become bald, as someone who has always had a fairly good relationship with her hair and always enjoyed wearing it long and braiding it and playing with its color, etc. Nonetheless, I'm going to go ahead and say that hair just might be overrated a tad, particularly when you are dealing with big life issues that leave less time for fuss.

When I am around others I cover my head with a scarf or a hat, but when it's just me I am feeling great just letting it all out. Thankfully, it is summer, and it is so cool when I am hot! My shower takes 2 minutes for the first time in my life (which is a really good thing let me tell you since my legs don't hold me up right now much longer than that anyway). I have this wonderful cream to help with the radiation burn (which, thankfully, I did not get very badly) and it makes my head soft like a baby's.

The top is just a bit fuzzy like when my sons get their first really short football crew cut of the season. As they have gotten older, they have lost all patience with me for rubbing the tops of those new cuts, so now I can sit here and pat my own soft fuzzy top whenever I feel like it! And as an added bonus, with my newly expanded stomach I can practice rubbing my belly and patting my head at the same time! (For those of you genuinely concerned about my mental status, don't worry...I don't actually do the belly part, I just couldn't resist the idea).

I love my pretty scarves and look forward to choosing one for the day. I even have a "cranial prosthesis" (OK, wig, but doesn't it sound so much fancier to say it the other way? My insurance company seems to think so) that I have not worn yet that I am looking forward to that is just different enough from my old hair that I am going to feel like a mystery woman when I put it on. When it is cooler.

But the very, very best thing about not having hair for the moment is not having to ever know where the hairbrush is. As a mother of four daughters, no amount of threats, punishments, complex hiding schemes (I even contemplated wiring it to the bathroom wall) had consistently kept my girls from stealing my hairbrush when they really, really needed it quickly. Like every day before school. I have been left post shower so many hours of my life desperately searching for my brush before my hair mats down for the day that I now literally leave the bathroom in a gleeful dance for not having to perform this ritual.

The few times recently that the girls have come in to me frantically asking where the brush is (considering, of course, that they have been amply supplied and resupplied with their own hair products), I have enjoyed such genuine, carefree laughter (and it really IS more fun to laugh when you have a Santa sized belly) that this alone has been nearly worth it all. Girls, figure out where your own darned hairbrushes are and devise a system to not lose them ever again. I feel change-a-coming, I do, I do!

So for now, happy bald! I've got a lot a work with.