I'm so devastated for my son

[Ghost315]

I see this thread was started almost exactly at the same time that I first started noticing I was going bald. Trust me, I understand the "anger" at your husband for passing this down to your son. The part about going bald early is what started me down the path of thinking that I want to avoid having biological children. I was 22 when I found out and trust me, going bald THAT early definitely ruins what are supposed to be the best years of your life, and I could never knowingly put my son/grandson through something like that. Of course, now there are other genetic things I don't want to pass on, but none of them are health related, all cosmetic. All things considered, I'm not a bad looking guy, especially with the amount of time I spend in the gym, but trust me when I say no amount of muscle will ever compensate for the damage that hairloss in your 20's does to your confidence.

It is my honest belief that the MOST important thing in the universe is a person's confidence, and mine was genetically stripped from me. I had to find out from some of my acquaintances in the military while I was training for a deployment. After I got back home from that deployment, I started looking at pictures from a couple years back and noticed evidence of it happening when I was 20, and possibly when I was 19. Of course when I talked to my parents about it, they said they noticed it happening years ago when I was 20, but didn't say anything because they didn't want me to worry. You have no idea how pissed I was. I wanted to scream at them for not telling me, because sure I would've been worried at first, but I could've gotten on rogaine or something and at least held onto what I had for a few more years. At the time that they noticed, it wouldn't have been a big deal to only have lost as little as I had. But by the time I knew about it, I had lost enough that it was pointless to try to hold onto it. I would've been holding onto a clearly balding head.

I wish I had seen this thread when I first found out so that I could yell at you to tell him ASAP!. Hurt his feelings now, but save the rest of his 20's. Especially since he started going bald in the back, that's like best case scenario. I could've easily lived with that in my 20's. I got the "old man" pattern the rest of my dad's family has, where they all started going bald in the front first, the ones who went bald anyway. Which I'd say is around 60-70% of the males in my dad's family.

I know they say that baldness is supposedly passed on by the mother, but there's not a single person on my mom's side of the family who EVER went bald...EVER!...until me. My mom's father died in his late 70's with a full head of grey hair. Not a single hair missing from his head. And there's not a male alive on my mom's side who's lost a hair yet. Meanwhile, well over half of my dad's family went bald at some point. And all had the exact same pattern. The only difference with me is that I started younger than any of them. It's because of this that I don't dare have children. I love my kids too much to have them. Putting them or any potential grandkids through this would be the only thing worse than me going through this. And believe me, I mentally curse my parents, awesome as they are, for putting me through this. I'd literally rather not have been born.

Now that I'm 27, it doesn't bother me AS much, but it still bothers me to some extent, and it bothers me even more that it stole the best years of my life and forced me to make the decision to give up the thing I wanted most, which was to eventually have my own children.