One thing I am definitely going to add to that pamphlet I am writing on Things They Do Not Tell You In Pregnancy Books is a section on the Horns Of Pregnancy.

When you’re pregnant, all the lovely estrogen flowing around your body that makes you crave chocolate and makes you bitch at the paperboy for leaving the paper ON THE PORCH instead of IN THE MAILBOX, AGAIN, also makes your hair grow thick and shiny and lovely. You don’t lose many hairs while you’re pregnant, so you can go ahead and grow out those Rapunzel locks you’ve always wanted.

Then, after the baby is born, your hormones all get out of whack and the estrogen drops and the testosterone rises and it’s hell on your hair. Suddenly it starts falling out in thick clumps all over the place, like you have suddenly adopted three German shepherds and two Persian cats and they’ve all decided to shed at once.

If you’re nursing you can probably delay the hair fallout for a few months after the birth, maybe until you introduce solids. But it’ll happen, sooner or later. A few months after I had Gal Smiley, my sister-in-law came to visit with her two boys. I still cringe when recalling my older nephew, AvidReader, complaining that he couldn’t play cars on the floor because “There’s too much hair in the way!” Time for an emergency vacuum!

I’ve never seen any descriptions of this phenomenon in books but it’s my own personal theory that the change in hormone levels causes something akin to male pattern baldness. Your hair falls out because of the sudden lack of estrogen, and it falls out just like it would on a 40-year-old man looking down the barrel of a mid-life crisis. You get little bald patches at your temples as your hairline starts to recede from your forehead in the familiar arrow-shaped pattern.

What this means that eventually, when it grows back in, you get tiny little tufts of hair on either side of your head, just at the outside corners of your eyes.

Usually these little short hairs are a little bit curly — or in my case, very curly. So they don’t like to lie flat. They like to curl upwards.

And if you are wearing your hair pinned back a lot these days — because, say, you have a small baby and can’t actually get it together enough to blow dry for 15 minutes every morning — then these little curls, standing straight up in the air on either side of your head, stand out quite a bit.

Thus I give you, the Horns Of Pregnancy.

I’m only just now getting to the stage where my Little Miss Sunshine horns have finally grown out enough so that, with judicious combing, I can hide them inside my regular hair. Every so often, though, one of them will pop out and curl up and mark me as a recent mom.

Ah, my very last horns. I’m feeling a little sentimental about them already.