Lucie’s future home (on left behind Virgin Mary) in photo taken by a thoughtful blog poster on Perfect Duluth Day who responded to the crazy woman who really, really wanted to see where the big truck will take her worldly goods.
Lately, I feel my life has been like that Talking Heads song, “Once in a Lifetime.” You know, the song that asks, “How did I get here?” I’ve had several people ask what on earth would drive me to rent out my home and move into a rectory - site unseen- where Our Lady of Mercy parishoners can make use of our bathroom on Sunday mornings. “Is the market really that tough,” they ask?
Well, it is a tough market - and having a husband who works out of town, two small children to tend to and writing clients to keep happy didn’t make it easy to live in a product. But that’s not the straw that broke the camel’s back - no, it was the lice.
Now before you stop reading thinking this will never happen to you, I’ve got bad news. Lice are more prevalent than ever. Schools right here in the Twin Cities have temporarily closed due to outbreaks they couldn’t get under control. Sadly, lice happens.
Driving to school to pick up the infested child (while scratching my head with one hand) I started to experience self-doubt. What if I was too grossed out to do this? I was picturing myself in a HAZMAT suit clumsily trying to comb through my daughter’s long hair. But when my Belle, sitting on the nurse’s office bench, quietly whispered to me that a classmate called her “lice girl” - it happened. That same Momma Bear emotion I had when she was a tiny newborn flushed over me and I knew that I could do - would do - anything for this child. I’m grateful for a little kick in the pants from Mother Nature and a lot of help from a kind school nurse.
The first thing the nurse did was assure me that lice had NOTHING to do with cleanliness. Apparently even when your house looks like something out of Dwell magazine, as mine did while on the market, your kid can still get lice. She then dove in with bare hands and schooled me on lice eggs (called nits). She taught me how to ID them, pluck them out and then compress them between my fingernails until I heard a most satisfying pop – the sound of victory.
Then we went shopping. I grabbed a “lice treatment system,” plunked down my $20 and started shampooing. It wasn’t until we all had our wet heads in towels did I read in the fine print in the instructions tucked inside the box. This product did not actually kill lice, just merely taunted them.
Now I’ll admit to being a pretty crunchy girlfriend. We shop organic as much as we can, we don’t put pesticides on our lawn and I try to make green choices – but at this moment I didn’t want an earth-friendly alternative treatment, I wanted lice to DIE! DIE! DIE! Back into the mini-van and another $20 later, we were ready for take two.
While medicated shampoo steeped on all our heads, I set up my workstation. I dragged out a big lamp, a kitchen chair along with paper towels, tweezers and bobby pins at the ready. Then I popped in a movie (lice girl’s choice) and taking a ½ in. square of hair at a time, I combed it with the kit’s special comb, inspected with a magnifying glass and then pinned it up. 140 bobby pins and over four hours later, we were done with our first of many passes. (Even if you think you got them all the first time, you really gotta look everyday for a week. I found a crafty nit two days later which could have made all my effort for naught.)
I pulled out about a dozen nits and found the momma louse walking around Belle’s scalp like a drunken sailor dazed by the toxic shampoo. Far from being incapacitated with fear, I pounced on that louse with my tweezers and crushed her mercilessly into a paper towel. Under my breath, I said a slew of unprintable words along with “teach you to bite my baby” and was gratified on a very base level.
But the hair is only the half of it. I realize now we weren’t exactly living the best practices for limiting the spread. When my husband is away, the kids sleep with me. When he’s home, they sleep together in either of their beds. Everything, I mean EVERYTHING needed to be laundered.
I washed 14 loads of clothes, linens, comforters, stuffed animals and towels – all in hot water. Items I couldn’t launder, I sprayed with lice killer and put into a hot dryer for an hour. I also wiped down couches and car seats. And some things, like pillows, I just threw out. Lice aren’t just gross, they’re expensive too.
After this was all over, I talked to our pediatrician, Dr. Hobbs. Hobbs told me there are more reports of “resistant lice” coming out and he often prescribes prescription lice shampoo to his patients. This could be because the louse is developing a resistance to the poisons we use against them or people are just shampooing and hoping for the best and foregoing the combing saga. Sadly, fighting lice is a multi-front war and no product is going to cut it alone - no matter what the box says.
That night I finally fell into bed around 2 in the morning. I had to have the house ready for a showing the next afternoon so I couldn’t just leave Laundry Mountain for another day. And while I think I worked pretty hard doing all this, I thought about the families without cars, without washers and dryers and how, with all my advantages, this was still darn tough. It’s good to mix a little grateful into one’s self-pity cocktail.
The following week my house was off the market and I’ll always think it was that tiny louse that broke me and drove me to the rectory. I never quite recovered. That and my husband called that night from Duluth and said, “I went to an air show on Canal Park and you know…it wasn’t very good. It was pretty disappointing.” Yeah, I wanted to strangle him and I think all that emotion just took the good fight out of me.
But on an up note, a girlfriend complimented me on my new highlights, “Oh, those aren’t highlights, that’s just the lice shampoo stripped the color out of my hair.”
CREDITS: The majority of this post is gleaned with permission from my Dr. Mom column I do for the nice folks at the Family Times magazine and is slated to run in the equally fun parenting blog from the Star Tribune called Cribsheet.
