Hair woes

I'm trying to grow my hair out.  I had this amazing idea when I was pregnant with Luke to get it all cut off to give it some "style" since I felt like the everyday ponytail look just wasn't cutting it.  My hairdresser tried, I mean REALLY tried to dissuade me.  He said the pregnancy hormones often make women have crazy ideas about cutting off their hair and then they come crying back to him after the baby is born blaming him for the terrible decision.  I told him this was not the hormones talking that I really truly needed a good change to my look and he finally relented.  I am now angry with him for allowing it to happen.  I miss my flowing long locks.  Ok, I never really had flowing long locks but I do miss the long haired me.  I don't really like that whenever Tim looks at pictures of me with long hair he says, "oh look how long your hair was here... you look so pretty".  He always follows that up with, "not that you don't look pretty now but...".  I also don't like that I went to a dinner party recently where a child-less 29 year old family friend said, "you look like such a MOM now!".  That hurt.  I purposely was trying to get a non-mom haircut but i guess my trying to look like Katie Holmes missed the mark.  I'm also a little upset no one told me (at least not forcefully enough) that shorter hair is MUCH more work (especially if style was one of the criteria for the new haircut).   Sadly I do not have the kind of hair that air dries well.  It gets bad curls.  So I need either spend 45 minutes with a large round brush (which tooks months to master by the way) to have semi-stylish hair or spend no time and have frizz-top.  Boy do I miss my ponytail.  So my go-to product these days is a wide headband.  I think it looks more stylish than a hat, keeps my half grown out bangs out of my face, makes me look like I could have just gone to the gym (or played in a tennis match) and covers the top of my frizz-top.  I'm just hoping that I'll wake up one morning (soon) and my long flowing locks will have returned and I can drive by my salon in peace.