One Day at a Time

That little pulling turned into more quiet time in the bathroom, resulting in more red spots that ultimately started moving her hairline back.  My daughter is now nine years old and has been dealing with hair pulling for nine months.  At its worse, she would pull out full clumps of hair essentially giving herself a mohawk. Day after day, I was stunned as I found hair littered throughout her room and ordered wider and wider headbands to cover the bald spots.  While the initial pulling seemed sporadic, it grew to be pretty consistent and embedded in fits of rage and huge mood swings. I was terrified. I no longer recognized my girl both physically and emotionally. What was happening?

 I felt completely overwhelmed. I had moved to spend the summer with family in the hopes that a change of scene with her favorite people might make things better, but it just kept getting worse.  While my family meant well, there was a pervasive feeling that they would be doing it differently.  My mother, fortunately, was the one that saw it all first hand and understood that this was a parenting challenge she had never encountered in raising her four children.   By month three, she had pulled 75% of her crown hair and there was no sign of it easing up. We had started seeing a therapist who was helping us track what prompted the pulling and how she felt, but at the rate we were going, she would be bald before any significant change was going to occur.  I felt certain I was missing something, it just didn't feel right.

I started researching every night after I put her to sleep. The stories were horrifying.  I would read medical journals that described the condition as a psychiatric disorder linked to OCD and anxiety.  There was very little information other then the prescription medicines that were prescribed for the disorder and many accounts indicating that they had very little impact on the hair pulling behavior.   I read stories from adults who had suffered from this condition for their entire life and a few teens who would give pretty graphic descriptions of their pulling habits, locations, feelings etc.   For hours, I was bombarded by pictures of bald spots, shaved heads, head bands, wigs, painted eye brows, and beanies all describing these heart wrenching conditions that profoundly impacted families and lives.  At the same time, I found a Facebook page of parents dealing with this condition and heard over and over again that we just needed to accept this as the new normal.  Hair was not important, our society over rated hair as beauty and we just needed to love our children no matter what. The level of despair I felt is indescribable.  Of course, I would love my daughter with or without hair but no way was I ready to accept her condition as the new normal. 

Fortunately, as is often the case, hope was right around the corner