Strangers used to open doors, help lift my pram and greet me with approval when I looked ‘like a mum’. After one simple haircut, I was treated very differently
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n November 2000, two weeks after giving birth to my first and only child, I found myself collapsed in bed, breastfeeding in front of Top of the Pops, hair matted, sheets dirty, surrounded by sick-soaked muslin rags. I liked it. Or at least, it felt like a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing, until Madonna – who had given birth to Rocco Ritchie only three months earlier – appeared on the screen in a cropped leather jacket, belly bared, sexy-dancing to Don’t Tell Me. Did I feel inspired? Resentful? Brimming with pity for this attention-seeker? For sure, it was all three.
As the weeks wore on, I began to see how it might be possible to shower, put on actual clothes and maybe even pop to the corner shop. Occasional visits to cafes, museums and other warm, baby-friendly spaces soon followed and stopped me from feeling as if I had fallen into a well of loneliness.
But I knew that, if I was to fully return to functional human-ing, I urgently needed to sift through my priorities. What time-consuming activities could I let go of? Housework was a no-brainer but eating probably had to stay. Top of the list of useless things to do – or so it seemed in my time-deprived mania – was haircare. What was the point of hair? You had to wash it, brush it and have it trimmed. Plus, I had grey roots so I also imagined I had to dye it.
