Reason Why I Can't Write No. 4332, Nit Picking--Marcia

Okay, I’m just going to spill it. Last week’s reason why “I Can’t Write” is Head Lice. Yup. My worst fear. I have seven-quajillion hair shafts per scalpimeter. I am louse nirvana. I am a warm hairy haven for creepy crawly scab-like parasites to blood suck to their heartless carapace’s content.

It’s not like I wasn’t suspicious.

The night we arrived home from Christmas vacation, I bolted out of bed. My head was alive with Pringles (prickling tingles). I rudely nudged my snoring husband. Get up! Can’t you see this is an E-mergency! Ahhh. Itch, itch, itch. Gaah. My husband is a 6’1” lumberer. He’s fast as lightning at his busy restaurant, but when it comes to the Honey Dos he’s slower than a glacier. It doesn’t help that he sleeps in the buff, but is unusually modest when it comes to roaming the halls naked. Any red alert requires his robe or a pair of pants. Good God, doesn’t the man know we have children? I’ve been wearing Flak suits to bed for the last ten years!

EIGHT HOURS LATER! when we finally got down the hall and snapped on the light, he half-heartedly fumbled around in my mane.

“See anything?” I asked, talking into the sink as I tried to get better exposure under the vanity’s dim bulb.

“Nah,” he said, scratching himself before shuffling off to bed.

Four seconds later I heard my ten year old climbing down the bunk bed ladder. He caught me in the bathroom still scratching away like an old blood hound.

“Mom, my head itches.”

My youngest has been scratching since Thanksgiving.

The next day I rushed, like a good mother, to Rite Aid and spent $20 on dandruff shampoo and an expensive treatment for scalp dermatitis. A week went by. We were still scratching. I loaded up Monday morning to head off to my job in KINDERGARTEN!--scratch scratch—thinking it’s probably time to call the doctor. That dermatitis cream is just NOT working.

Tuesday night, per usual, I was snuggled down with James reading him a book when I took a good scratch at the back of my noggin and felt something--something vaguely scab-like. I dragged it down the hair shaft and pinched it between my fingers. It took awhile for me to register what I was looking at. It sort of looked like a patch of dead skin. Translucent, brown and grey flecked. Then I saw its weensy legs move.

Just as I jumped out of bed my husband walked through the door. Both kids, moments ago calm and sleepy eyed, began screaming and jumping around on both feet.

“Lice!”

“Lice!”

“It’s Lice!”

“Are you sure?” Hubby asks.

“Well what else looks like a moving scabie with wiggly legs and sucks the blood from your scalp?”

“You don’t know that, it could be anything.” He scanned the room for the remote.

“It’s LICE!” From all three of us.

He was still in his coat, bags in hand, slowly taking in the fact that he was not going to get to unpeel the film on the Haagen Daas and park it in front of ESPN.

“We need you to go straight to Rite Aid and get everything you can.”

“Now?”

“Now!” I win because I am already in pjs, and the louse was in my hair.

My husband proceeds to putter around the house, not really sure we have self-diagnosed correctly. Those of us being drained of our life’s blood by parasites are swarming like an angry mob. There is no possible way for him to move fast enough.

I remembered reading that you can kill lice by smothering them in Vaseline. I’ve had a tin of Bag Balm lying around in my room for years. I find it tucked back in my closet behind some gloves. There is half a tin left. I scoop all of it out. I plaster a baseball sized blob of Bag Balm all over my head. But this only covers the top layer. I rummaged through the bathroom cupboards. Half used bottles of Lubriderm, saline solution, and outdated Immodium tablets are flying off the shelves. No Vaseline, but I do find a small container of organic baby-friendly Vapo Rub. I slap that on my head, trying to massage it into my scalp. My hair now can be honed to a point and stand for days on its own. Think Coneheaded troll meets Rita Marley. Rastafari-with a faint hint of eucalyptus and liniment. But the itching stopped. I wrap my head in plastic wrap for good measure. That’ll killem for sure.

My Hub comes home with $40 bucks worth of product and a bad attitude. He takes one look at me.
“Well that won’t wash out “til Easter.”

“Everything should be good and dead by then.”
We set to work on the kids. Nine, ten, and eleven o’clock went by.

They fell asleep at 1:00 on the couch, too afraid to go back to their beds, now orgiastic communes for loose lice.

I couldn’t blame them. After treating myself and combing at the madness with a microscopic Barbie comb until 4:00 AM, I too fell asleep on a couch—one in another room, one they don’t usually sit on. Sorry.

I tried to put a good face on it. Tell my husband to consider it valuable bonding time. Wow, we rarely spend this much time together in one spot—so what if it’s hunched over our squirming children with clamp light and magnifying glass in hand.

I didn’t see the sunshine until Friday afternoon, when I took a break from the combing and picking and piles of laundry and vacuuming. I thought I was losing my mind.

But the thing is, it wasn’t all bad. I got my kids to wash their hair. I put their heads in the kitchen sink, just like my mom used to do with me. It turns out Daniel has beautiful rich brown curls that glisten prettily when treated with DDT. They no longer fight when I nit pick. Believe me, we all understand the true meaning of that word now. And we’ve had to slow down and let absolutely everything go. Our whole life is about laundry and hair.

Ironically, I got a call from my sister-in-law in California a few hours ago. I hear her voice on the machine and tell the kids to knock it off, Granny must be sick. I call her back as soon as I find the phone. It’s not Granny . . . It’s L-I-C-E.

I have come to find, once I came out of the closet about our family’s dread condition, that everybody has had it. I am not kidding you. Everybody. And everybody has a remedy. None of them work.

The most telling bit of research claims that Ancient Egyptians were found buried with their lice combs, mayonnaise and Rid. To this day, the best cure is a comb and your fingernails. I will, however, try one neighbor’s suggestion of dousing your head in Listerine and wearing a shower cap for an hour or so. I will also try Cherie’s (my sis-in-law) pediatrician’s choice—a head full of Cetaphil applied hair-dye style, blow dried in, and left overnight. If your hair doesn’t break off in your sleep, you’re cured!

The problem with Lice is you are, in good conscience, supposed to tell the schools, daycares, and close friends who may have rubbed themselves against your children’s heads that they may also have the plague.

I called the school, told the office ladies, and they announced over the loud speaker that there had been a “bio hazard” in the Kindergarten and 4th grade and could those teachers please come to the office at their convenience. This of course raised the eyebrows of every good parent volunteering in the classrooms, and set everyone to trying to figure out who had the be-crittered heads.
Next time I will choose my sister-in-law’s way. She wrote an anonymous note to the pre-school, folded it, handed it to my brother who then, like a messenger for the King, pedaled it on his bicycle up to the school to slip under the doorframe.

Unfortunately there was a “Village Meeting” going on; parking lot full--good parents swarming. He had to abort.

“Do you think anyone noticed?” Cherie asked.

“I don’t think anyone saw me,” my brother said. “It was getting dark, I was wearing a hat.”

He went out on his stealth mission several hours later in the dead of night, pulled up the weather stripping on his child’s classroom and delivered the news. His child will not be called “Madagascar” (Kindergartners, what do they know), told to get away, or shunned on the bus. I’m all for subterfuge now.

I find myself scanning the heads in the classroom and at my sons’ basketball and hockey practices for newly shorn hair. I check for nits as I bend over to help a kid with their letters. When I scratch my ankle I think, can they get down there? When I scratch other places I think, oh Jesus, Not There!

I have had a good laugh this week, now that the worst days are over, hearing other people’s stories and laughing at the sheer exhaustion of the work involved. But now you’ll have to excuse me, my ears itch, and I’ve got to go spend some time bonding and legitimately nit picking at my family.

If you need any advice, let me know. I am now an expert at something.

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