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My kids came home for the summer and by the second week they had humiliated me by accident and it is the best thing that has happened to me in two years. So bear with me. I am Denise. I am 54. Married 29 years to a man named Ray who has never once, in three decades, given me a reason to doubt him. Two kids. Claire is twenty, Danny is twenty two. Both of them home from school for the summer, both of them eating everything in the house, both of them wonderful. I used to be the one who handled things. That was my whole personality, honestly. Something breaks, Denise fixes it. Somebody is sick, Denise shows up. I was the one with the spare charger and the emergency snacks and the number for the plumber. And I think that is exactly what ruined me. Because somewhere in the last two years I stopped being a woman who handles things and became a woman who manages herself. It happened so slowly I never noticed it happening. Something would start bothering me. I would go online, or go to the store, and I would buy the thing that dealt with it. And then that was handled, and I would move on, and a few weeks later something else would start and I would handle that one too. One at a time. Quietly. On my own. I never told Ray about most of it because none of it seemed big enough to say out loud. What was I going to say. That my knees make a noise now. So. Second week of the summer. The kids are bored. That specific kind of bored where they have run out of friends to see and they start going through the house the way they did when they were nine. Claire is looking for nail scissors. She opens my nightstand drawer. And she pulls out a back scratcher. One of those extendable metal ones with the little claw on the end. She holds it up like she has found a murder weapon and she says, MOM. And then it becomes a game. They went room to room. I am not exaggerating. They made an actual event of it and they were shrieking. They found the second back scratcher in my car. They found the little desk fan running in the corner of my bedroom in June, in a house with central air. They found three different body lotions in the bathroom, all half used, all different brands, because none of them ever did what I bought them for. They found ibuprofen in the kitchen drawer, in my purse, and in the pocket of my winter coat. They found the melatonin and the magnesium powder and the sleep tea I bought after the melatonin stopped working. They found the blood pressure monitor still in the box on the shelf where it had been since I bought it. They found the sticky notes. Little notes to myself on the fridge and the mirror and the dashboard, about things I would never in my life have needed to write down before. And they found the clothes in the back of my closet with the tags still on. One size bigger. Bought quietly, back in the spring, and never worn because wearing them would have meant admitting I bought them. They laid it all out on the kitchen table. Every single thing. And Claire was laughing so hard she had tears running down her face and she looked at me and said: "Mom, how many problems do you actually have?" And I laughed. I want you to understand that I laughed genuinely. Harder than they did. My kids were home and they were happy and they were being affectionate with me in that brutal way that only your own children can be. It was funny. It was so funny. Then Danny went back for one more sweep and came out of the hallway holding my purse upside down. And out of the bottom of it fell a freezer bag with a clean pair of underwear folded inside it. And Claire stopped laughing. She did not say anything. She just picked it up off the floor, and put it back in my purse, and zipped it, and set the purse on the chair. And she moved on to something else. Nobody at that table noticed except me. They went to bed around eleven. I said I was going to clean up. I did not clean up I sat down at that table with all of it still spread out in front of me and I counted. Nine. Nine things. Nine problems I had solved nine separate times, on nine different days, over about two years, and not one single time had I ever put them next to each other. It took my twenty year old daughter looking for nail scissors to do that for me. And there was a tenth thing. There was a tenth thing that was not on that table, that nobody found, because I have never left it anywhere anybody could find it. I am still not going to tell you what it is. I made a list that night and I took it to my doctor that same week, because the joke did something two years of quiet buying had not. He was lovely, by the way. I want to be fair to him. He was patient and he was thorough and he went down that list item by item and he had an answer for every single one. Stress. Your age. Normal after two children. Try something thicker. Look at your mother. And then he said, kindly, "Denise, there is nothing on this list that worries me." Nine problems in. Nine answers out. He did exactly what I had been doing to myself. He just did it faster and with a medical degree. Now. My sister Ingrid was staying with us that summer. Ingrid moved to Sweden 28 years ago and she comes back for two weeks every year and takes over my kitchen and rearranges my spice rack. She is three years older than me. Same mother. Same hair. Same everything. And she was standing right there in the kitchen the night of the drawer game. She saw the whole thing. She saw my face after. A few days later we were out walking and she asked me what the doctor said. I told her. All of it. The list, the nine answers, nothing on this list worries me. And she stopped walking. She said, "You gave him nine things and he gave you nine answers." And I said yes. "Denise. It is not nine things." Here is what she told me on the rest of that walk. I am going to keep it short, because she kept it short. There is a hormone called DHT. It has been in your body your entire adult life and it has never once caused you a problem, because your estrogen stood in front of it. That was the arrangement. Estrogen in front. DHT behind it. Nothing happening. Then in your late forties the estrogen goes. And nothing replaces it. And nothing else steps in front. And DHT is standing there for the first time in thirty years with absolutely nothing in its way. The first place it goes is your follicles. That is what it does. That is what it has always done. It just could never reach them before. My hair. I had been collecting it, if you want to know. Off the pillow, off the bathroom floor, out of the drain. Not saving it. Just noticing it, every day, and saying nothing, for two years. It was the one thing about me people used to comment on. I had bought the root spray. I had learned which way the part hides it. I had stopped wearing it up. I had stopped going in photographs, and when I could not get out of a photograph I knew exactly where to stand. I had a whole second job I never told anybody about, including my husband. Ingrid did not stop when she saw my face. She just slowed down a little, and kept going. And everything else on my kitchen table was the same drop, arriving in a different department. The estrogen that was standing in front of DHT was also the estrogen doing a job in my skin, and my joints, and my sleep, and the wall of my bladder. Same hormone. Same two years Nine departments closing one at a time. One thing left. Everything else is downstream of that. So I asked her what you are supposed to do about it. She said you cannot put the estrogen back. That part is over, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something. But DHT you can do something about. She takes two things every morning and has for six years. The first one is saw palmetto. Its job is to get to the receptor first. It sits where DHT wants to attach, so when DHT arrives there is already something in the way. The second one is pumpkin seed oil. Its job is further back down the line. It slows the enzyme that converts testosterone into DHT in the first place, so there is less of it being made at all. One stops it being made. One stops it landing. She said most women take one of them and wonder why nothing changed. Then she told me where she got it from, which is the part that actually convinced me. Ingrid's mother in law is Austrian. She is from a region in the south of the country where they have been pressing oil out of pumpkin seeds for about three hundred years. Not as a supplement. As food. As the thing you take in the morning, the way we take coffee. That woman is 81. She has had a spoonful of it before breakfast every day of her adult life, and so did her mother, and so did hers. Ingrid said nobody in that family has ever heard of an enzyme. They were not taking it for their hair and they were not taking it for anything in particular. They took it because you take it, and they have been doing that for three hundred years, and eventually somebody with a laboratory caught up and explained why it works. The saw palmetto is the modern half. The oil is the old half. Ingrid started both when she was fifty one. And I want to be honest about my sister, because she is a walking advertisement. Her hair flows so beautifully. There is no back scratcher in her house. No fan. No freezer bag. No second job she does not tell her husband about. Three years older than me. Same mother. Same hair. She would not tell me what to buy, by the way. She is infuriating like that. She said learn what to look for and then go and look, because most of what is out there is garbage. So here is what she told me to look for. Both of them. Together. In one capsule. Not one of them. Cold pressed and not heat processed, because heat destroys the part of the oil that does the work. The dose the research actually used, and not the biggest number printed on the front of the bottle. And made for a woman, because most of what is sold as pumpkin seed oil is a men's prostate supplement with a different colored cap on it. Working that out took me about a week and I would rather you did not spend the week. Somebody had already put ten of them side by side and written the whole thing down. https://trybloomandbond.com/pages/psos-on-the-market I am not going to tell you what to buy any more than Ingrid told me. Go and look. One thing before I tell you what happened, and I mean this. Now. The first month, nothing. I want to be honest about that, because I nearly quit. Around week six I noticed I had stopped reaching for the back scratcher at night. Not gone. Just not the first thing I did anymore. Around week ten I washed my hair on a Sunday and cleaned the drain afterward out of pure habit and there was almost nothing in it. I stood in the shower and said, out loud, huh. Somewhere in there the fan came out of the bedroom. I could not tell you the exact week, which is the strange part. These things do not announce themselves leaving the way they announced themselves arriving. Month four is when I found the baby hairs. A soft fringe of them along my hairline that would not lie down no matter what I did to them. Ridiculous. Fluffy. I stood in my bathroom with the door locked and cried about my own stupid frizz. Month five, Ray came up behind me while I was making coffee, put his hands on my shoulders and said, "Your hair's different." Not a compliment. He was not trying. He just noticed. I told him everything that night. The two years. The photographs. The way I have been standing in them. All he said was, "I thought you were just tired." He had been standing right there the whole time. The lotions are down to one now. I stopped carrying the freezer bag somewhere around month four and did not notice until I went looking for something else. The monitor came out of the box and my doctor and I are talking about that one properly, which is between him and me. The sticky notes are still there. Some of that is just who I am. My doctor was right, by the way. There was nothing on that list that worried him. Every single thing on it worried me. That was the whole problem. He was looking at nine small things that were each individually fine. I was living inside a body where all nine of them were happening at once, to me, and not one person had ever looked at it as one thing. If you are reading this and something in it landed, do what I did that night. Put them next to each other. Not one at a time on nine different days. All of them. At once. On one table. The sleep and the joints and the skin and the itch and the temperature and the thing in the bottom of your purse and the thing you have never told anybody, including the person you have slept beside for twenty nine years. And then picture yourself somewhere around next spring. Washing your hair without doing the math afterward. Standing at the front of a photograph without arranging anything first, because there is nothing left to arrange. Reaching into a drawer for something and realizing you have not needed it in months. That is not a fantasy. That is just what happens when nine things turn out to be one thing. If you have been solving yourself quietly, one problem at a time, for two years. If a doctor has looked at your list and given you an answer for every single item and no help at all. If you have been told this is just your age by somebody who was being kind when they said it. Then please do not do what I did and wait for a twenty year old to find your purse. It did not give me my hair back. It got in the way of the thing that was taking it, and my body did the rest. My mother went through every single thing that was on that kitchen table. I know she did. The only word she ever used about any of it was fine. I told Claire everything last month. All of it. The freezer bag, the photographs, the two years. She is not going to be fifty four and figuring this out on a sidewalk. And neither are you. https://trybloomandbond.com/pages/psos-on-the-market