My Wife Found the Photo, Not Me

She was looking for a receipt in the camera roll, scrolling fast, and she stopped on one from our son's birthday in the spring. I'm behind the cake, leaning in to help him with the candles, and the kitchen light is coming straight down and going right through the top of my head. She wasn't even looking at me when she stopped. She said, "aw, look at his little face." And I looked, and I swear to you I could not see our son's face. All I could see was the rest of the photo. The part that was me.

I didn't say anything. I just felt that drop you get in your stomach when something you've been half-aware of for a long time finally stands up in front of you and refuses to be ignored.

I should back up, because the photo wasn't really the start of it. The photo was just the day I couldn't pretend anymore.

I'm 47. I don't know the exact morning it began, because it doesn't begin on a morning. It accumulates. At some point a couple of years back I became the man who offers to take the group picture. "Somebody's got to be behind the camera," I'd say, like I was doing everyone a favor, and everyone believed me because it's a generous-sounding thing to say, and I believed me too, mostly. There was a ball cap that lived in the car. I told myself it was for the sun. Then I noticed I was reaching for it to walk into the grocery store, into a restaurant, into anywhere with those bright ceiling lights, and you can't blame the sun for a Kroger. I had developed opinions about where I sat at dinner. I had a way of tilting my head for photos that I'd never consciously decided on. I'd started looking at the drain after a shower and then looking away fast, like I'd caught myself doing something I shouldn't.

Reader-submitted progress

These are the kinds of photos men were comparing at home.

No studio shoot, no perfect lighting. Just the awkward camera angles men actually use when they are trying to decide if anything changed.

None of it was a decision. That's the part I'd want you to understand if you're anything like I was. You don't sit down one day and choose to start hiding. It just sort of grows over you, one small adjustment at a time, until one day your whole life has quietly rearranged itself around not being seen from above, and you've told yourself the entire time that it doesn't bother you.

It bothered me. It bothered me in that specific way you're not allowed to talk about, because a man complaining about his hair is supposed to be a joke, so you swallow it and it just sits in your chest and goes quiet and heavy.

The night that actually got to me, my wife said something. Not a fight, nothing dramatic. We were getting ready for bed and out of nowhere she said, "you used to like having your picture taken." That's all. She wasn't trying to wound me, she'd just noticed, the way she notices everything, that I had slowly erased myself from the record of our own family. There are whole stretches of the last few years where I'm simply not in any of the pictures, and she'd clocked it before I had the nerve to. I didn't have a single thing to say back. I lay there in the dark with it.

That was about when I bought the trimmer. The good kind, the one the barber uses. The plan was Saturday. Take it all down to nothing, "own it," make the joke before anyone else could, and be done with the whole exhausting business of caring about something I wasn't allowed to care about. I had it sitting in the bathroom drawer for three weeks, like a decision I kept almost making.

What stopped me was my brother-in-law, of all people, which I still find a little annoying because he and I have never agreed on anything in twenty years. I'd noticed his hair looked better the last couple of times we'd seen them, and I'd assumed he'd put on a little weight in the face, because that's the kind of small, mean thing your brain offers you when you're jealous and won't admit it. At a cookout I finally just asked him. And he told me he'd been putting something on his scalp every morning.

Then he said the thing that actually moved me, and it wasn't a sales pitch, it was almost an aside. He said the hair isn't necessarily gone when it thins like this. That the root can just sit there, alive, not doing much, for years. That "thin" doesn't automatically mean "finished."

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A real box, single-use ampoules, and a routine simple enough to keep doing.

I want to be honest that I did not go become an expert. I'm not the reader in the family. I read enough to satisfy myself that there was something real underneath it and not just hope in a bottle, and then I made a decision the way I make most of them, which is by figuring out what I had to lose. The answer was: almost nothing. There was a money-back guarantee, a few months long, so the actual worst case wasn't "I waste money." The worst case was that I'd shave my head in the fall instead of this Saturday, and get my money back, and nobody would ever have to know I'd tried. For a man who'd spent two years hiding, "nobody has to know" was a strong selling point all by itself.

The product's from a company called Nordic Biolabs. It's a small vial, you rub it into a dry scalp first thing in the morning, you skip the weekends. That's the whole routine. I'm telling you that so you don't picture some big production. It takes two minutes and you feel slightly stupid doing it, especially at first, when nothing is happening.

And for the first month, nothing happened. I want to be straight about that because if I'd been promised fireworks I'd have quit and called it a scam. There were mornings I stood there with this little vial thinking, what are you doing, you're a grown man, just shave it. The only reason I kept on was that my brother-in-law asked me how it was going at another get-together and I didn't want to admit I'd already given up.

The first thing that changed wasn't even on my head. It was the pillow. There was just less on it. Then less in the drain. I noticed the absence of something before I noticed the presence of anything, which is a strange way to get your hope back, but I'll take it.

Then one night at dinner my wife reached over and put her hand on the top of my head, the way she does, and went quiet for a second and said, "there's little ones coming in here. At the front." And I got up from the table and went into the bathroom and turned my phone flashlight on and tilted my head under it like a teenager checking for a first mustache, and she was right. There were these fine, soft little hairs along the front that hadn't been there.

I'm not going to give you a number or a dramatic reveal, because that's not how it went and I don't want to sell you something that didn't happen to me. It was gradual. It was modest. I don't have my twenties back. But by the end of the three months the top had filled in enough that I stopped doing all the little things, the tilting and the cap and the seat, mostly because I forgot to.

Here's the moment I actually keep. There's a photo from Labor Day. I'm at the grill, sun directly overhead, the exact conditions I had spent two years arranging my life to avoid. My son took it. And I looked at it on my phone and I didn't flinch, and instead of deleting it I sent it to my wife, who was standing maybe fifteen feet away. I couldn't have said any of this to her face. But I could send her a picture of myself, which I hadn't done in years, and she knew exactly what it meant, and she texted back a heart and didn't make a thing of it, which was the kindest possible response.

That's the whole story. What changed wasn't really the hair, in the end. It was that I stopped spending energy every single day performing a not-caring I never felt. That turns out to be heavier than the caring ever was.

So if you've got a trimmer in your drawer right now, and a Saturday in mind, all I'll say is this: it'll keep. The trimmer isn't going anywhere. Give the other thing a few months first. The worst case is you end up exactly where you're standing tonight, a little time poorer, and you do the Saturday thing in the fall. The best case is you get a photo you actually keep. That was a bet I could live with.

Mentioned in this report

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