The L-Word

04.13.06

            So a couple of weeks ago my mother’s rifling through my daughter’s hair and she thinks she sees something.  I have instant recall of my kid waking up from her nap that afternoon and scratching her head like crazy and get the whole sinking/dread/godhelpme feeling of no no no please let’s not do this, I don’t have time or energy to deal with the head itchies.  Ack!

            I look, praying my mum is having a dramatic moment.

            Yeah, right, I should ever be so lucky in my life.  Ha-ha.  The world hates me.

            I take a nice, careful, slow look, begging fate or god or karma or whatever the heck’s out there to let it not be true.  But this is MY life we’re in, so of course fate or god or karma is against me.

            It’s definitely The L word.  And not the Showtime lesbian version of Sex-in-the-City kind of L-Word, either.

            We’ve done this once before.  The only good part of having done this already is there’s still pesticide shampoo in my bathroom closet.  Go directly home to bathtub.  Do not pass go, do not give warm snuggly hugs.   There’s no drawing the “get out of jail free” card on this one.

            Bath and shampoo.  Check.

            Bedding into the washer on hot.  Check.

            Stuffed animals bagged tight and out of sight for two weeks.  Check.

            Carpet vacuumed.  Check.

            Okay … kid’s in bed sleeping and I can finally sit down and relax, except for two things:  My head itches and I have the creepy crawlies all over my body, and … I WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT CAME FROM.

            My kid doesn’t go to daycare, she goes to grandma’s.  Grandma will vacuum and use the shampoo, but she wigs out and gets mad if I suggest such nonsense that the itchies came from her house. 

            Oh yeah, I also want to know if I have it or if my itchies are purely psychological.  My husband looks through my hair and says I’m all good.

            This would be a great relief, except he can’t see toilet paper in the bathroom cabinet, so his powers of observation are suspect.  I decide to use the shampoo every day for at least a week.  Maybe two.

            And don’t think the bath and bedding and stuffed animals and carpets are the end of it.  Oh no.  I still have to examine every strand of my 2 and a half year old’s hair.  Oh yeah, there’s something to look forward to.  She doesn’t sit still to EAT, much less to let mom do anything whatsoever with her hair.  The teenage babysitters seem to do all right with pigtails, etc, but I never have any luck.  Tomorrow’s gonna be so much fun.

            I can hardly sleep for imagining those little suckers hatching and breeding and hatching and breeding.  Ugh.  Somebody shoot me.

            So the next morning I’m at Walmart by six o’clock.  More pesticide shampoo, fancy fine-tooth combs … and a brand new Dora the Explorer video because a new video gives me a slight edge on the sitting still issue.  As I’m buying all this crap I wonder for the umpteenth time when they’re going to institute the First National Bank of Walmart.  I figure once they get that all settled I can just direct deposit my paychecks and skip the middle-man that is my credit union.      I wake the kid up and pop her right in the tub to do the shampoo thing again.  Put all her bedding in the washer AGAIN.  Vacuum AGAIN.

            Park her in front of the video and start combing through her hair.   

            Do you know where the term “nit-pick” comes from? 

            I do.

            Her hair is so fine that the combs aren’t worth a damn.  Anything that needs to be removed requires fingernails.  And every time I found anything to remove our dear friend Dora would start singing, and my kid would start bouncing and I’d lose track of what needed removing.  Oh fer fun!

            I’m really, really (and I mean REALLY) happy to find, over the course of two hours, that I’ve caught the whole awful itchy life cycle early in the game.  Still, I want this to be over with TODAY so I pick at my daughter’s hair until she pretty much hates me.

            She naps, exhausted from our battles.  When she wakes up the bedding goes back into the wash and so on and so forth.  I think you’ve got the idea by now.

            At bedtime I park her in her high chair (which hasn’t been used for months) and put the video on again.  Comb through her hair until I’ve found nothing at all over the course of an hour.

            I put her to bed fairly confident that the problem is solved, although over the next week I know I’ll be checking her head compulsively.

             I shampoo my own head one more time.

            Sometimes the creepy-crawlies are all in your head.  Sometimes they’re real.

 

Reader Weekly archive: http://www.readerweekly.us/2006/366/Sheri_Johnson.htm