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Three months after my 5-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia, I cut off my hair.

It’s not what you think; I wasn’t shaving it in solidarity with her hair loss. In fact, she didn’t start losing her hair in earnest until a couple months later. And while I did donate my eight-inch ponytail to Beautiful Lengths for use in free wigs for low-income women with cancer, the decision to cut my hair was about much more than charity. It was about punctuation.

Or, perhaps more accurately (if I stick with the writing metaphor), inserting a page break and starting a new chapter.

When I look back at the history of my hair over the years, I see a similar pattern: changes in my hair, whether drastic and intentional or passive and gradual, cleave close to the plotlines my life.

Read the rest of this post over at Femamom or The Huffington Post.

 

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