"Cut it off," I said to the face in the mirror, a face I barely recognized, my own. Blotchy and puffy from post-pregnancy hormones. Heavy, leaden eyes from lack of sleep.

"Okay, but are you sure?" came the voice of the woman behind me, her eyebrows over-tweezed in perfectly plucked arches, making her look perpetually startled. There was a tattoo on her right hand just below her wrist. The tattoo seemed important, like some kind of sign. What it said was unclear.

"Cut it all off," I repeated. My hair hung in a ponytail down my back, a light brown rope. I wanted it gone. The ponytail would go to Locks of Love, an organization that makes hairpieces for children with long-term hair loss. But that wasn't why I was doing it. I wanted a new face to match my new life, only I didn't know who that face was.

The ponytail dropped to the floor. The woman spun me around and tilted the chair back, pouring out shampoo that smelled like rosemary and mint and began washing the old me away. I could see now that the tattoo on her wrist was of the initials E.W., its once-black ink faded to the dull blue of a bruise.

She toweled dry my hair and my head felt light. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine who E.W. was. A boyfriend, or a child, or the woman herself. Maybe I needed initials on my wrist to remind me who I was.

Cut, cut, cut. Snip, snip. Clippers shaving the back of my neck. The warm air from the blow dryer. More rosemary, more mint. Hairspray. When she was done, she held out a mirror in a black plastic frame and said, "You can look." She turned the seat slowly, so I could get the view from all sides.

I looked exactly as I did before: blotchy and puffy and tired. Only with short hair.

I left the salon feeling like more of a failure than I had when I entered. One of the things people tell you, when you are a new mother, is to take care of yourself. Make time for your own needs. See your friends. Eat out, once in a while. Get a new haircut. What I was learning was that none of these things were as easy to do as they sounded.

Several years later, my friend Emily, who spent time working and studying in India, told me that there, a woman cuts her hair as a sign of grief. I thought about how sad I had been feeling in the salon; how much I had been missing my old, pre-baby life and how badly I wanted to be able to go back to it, if only for a short time. Maybe my haircut was a way of me trying to let go of that life, a way of saying goodbye.

Another friend, Mary, told me that hair holds psychic energy. If this is true, then ten years of my life were captured in that long ponytail. My wedding to Tom in a morning ceremony on the shores of Flathead Lake. Moving into our first home, which was an unfinished log cabin five miles south of the Canadian border. Another move, 700 miles east across the state to a landscape of wide-open grasslands. And the birth of our first child, a son. So many changes; so much living. Maybe it was, finally, too much weight to carry.

The thing no one tells you about short hair is that it's a lot of work. My hair is thick and curly, and for any short style to look like it should, I needed to keep it trimmed. Which meant that I got a fresh cut every four weeks. It became my way of marking my days as a newborn mom.

During this season of short-hair, I learned to understand my baby's cues--the cry that meant he was scared, or the cry that meant he was hungry. The cry that meant, "Change my diaper!" and the one that meant, "I'm lonely!" We made it through a bought of sleeplessness and constant nursing at six-weeks. The coos and giggles came, too, and the first smile. All the milestones, all the moments. They arrived when they should, as they were supposed to, and this made me feel like a good mom. My baby grew, and my confidence in myself as a mom grew, too.

Soon enough, my sadness over losing my old self seemed like a long-ago thing, a silly thing. The writer C. S. Lewis describes the experience of passing through grief like stepping into a cold room: at first, all you feel is the cold. Slowly, as your body adjusts, you become less aware of it. The room warms around you, until you realize you are no longer cold, only you can't say exactly when it happened. It was that way for me, too.

The loss that I felt, that I wanted to mark, of my old life was filled up by new life. The soft, downy hair on the top of my son's head, which I couldn't resist kissing. The sweet rosebud of his lips. Chubby baby toes. The way his head fit perfectly beneath my chin, his ear on my heart. Rocking with him in the glider brought me the most peaceful, complete moments I had ever known.

* * *

It's been eight years since the haircut. In that time, we've moved again, back to the lake where Tom and I were married. There have been two more babies. More milestones; some familiar, some new. All the while, my hair has been growing.

It's long again. Another light brown rope down my back. A woman in the grocery store stopped me and said, "You have such lovely hair! And how brave of you, keeping it long at your age!" I was stunned, then I thought, She's right. I'm getting too old for long hair. I should cut it and start fresh.

But this time of my life has been full of my children's' growing-up: first steps and first words. Birthday parties and holidays and summer vacations. And with each passing year, as they grow into themselves, I let go of my kids a little more. If it's true that hair holds memory, I'm not ready to cut it off just yet.

And there's more: sometimes I find myself thinking about the woman I was before I had kids. The woman who moved through life without a purse-full of matchbox cars and crayons, without an internal list of child-friendly restaurants. The woman who knew what it was like to have uninterrupted conversations and who could fill a lazy afternoon reading a book. I'm going to need her, again. Like Rapunzel, my long hair is a rope back to her.

I don't know what to do about my hair. For now, it's a way of remembering--not only what has happened, but who I was as it happened. It's a way of remembering me.