Hmm, it's been two years. Where to begin? Well, I think I'll start out by saying that since the family dynamics have changed, this blog will change a little. Chris and I have gotten divorced, my sister Stephanie lives with us, we've adopted pets and other pets have died. But since we're still a family and since there are still two and four legged creatures in the house, Creature Feature House is picking up where it left off.
Here's the creature count as of today:
3 kids: check
Two adult sisters: check
1 rabbit: check
1 dog: check
1 cat: check
wasps that fly in and out of the house to terrify us: check
lice: AHHHHHHH!!!
Oh dear heavens. The lice. They decided to invade just as my dryer broke. First, they were defeated and the dryer was fixed. And then they returned, and both the dryer and the washer broke. When that happened I was tempted to shave all of the hair off of everything in the house. I didn't do anything that drastic, but I did cut our hair.
I remember it vividly. I had come home from work that day, and was sitting in between Emma and Christopher at the kitchen table. Sitting in between them enables me to help them with their homework simutaneously, and doing that helps me go insane. Which apparently I like. But on this day in particular, sitting so close to them, helping them with 2nd and 3rd grade math problems that I no longer understand, not only did I go insane, but I nearly shaved my head. Because what happened was, I gave Christopher some instruction with his math, and then turned to Emma while she was bent down at her page, obediently scribbling down answers to horrific division problems, and I saw it. I saw a small, light gray bug walking across her hair.
I knew what it was. I had seen it's like before when Claire had had lice two years ago, and suddenly I remembered all of it all at once - the stinky shampooing, the hours of singling out hairs and pulling nits from them while a miserable child tugged and begged for release. And all the laundry....the dryer. Oh crap. Our dryer was broken. "Maybe it's not lice," I told myself. "Maybe it's just some bug that got in her hair." There was only one way to tell. I had to catch it.
All of these thoughts happened within seconds of seeing the bug. That's what happens after your first bout with lice. The second you see what you think might be a louse, or your kid scratching her head, you switch into Lice Survival Mode. You must seek and destroy.
"Emma," I said, heavily. "Don't move."
So of course, she moved. She twisted to me, and saw the severe, determined look on my face. She also probably noticed that I wasn't looking at her. Just the top of her head."What? What's wrong?" she asked.
"Don't move your head!" I snapped. "I saw a bug."
Most girls, or anybody really, would jump out of their seat at this kind of news, and go into a wild dance hoping to shake off the bug. But Emma just looked up.
"On my head?"
In response I seized her head and began sorting through hairs until I found it. And of course it was a louse. I searched the other two and found the same thing. Then I had Stephie check me, even though I knew odds were I hadn't escaped. And I was right. Luckily, Stephanie was spared. She credited this to the daily use of hair products, regular color treatment, and blow drying every day. Us no-chemical-air-drying fools didn't stand a chance.
Our house immediately went into lock down mode. No one was allowed in or out. All of the sheets were stripped from the beds and stacked by the washer. I drove to the store and bought sixty dollars worth of lice treatment shampoo, spray for the upholstery, extra laundry detergent, and hair scissors.
"Scissors?" Claire asked, taking them out of the Walmart bag. "Why'd you get these?"
"Because I'm cutting our hair."
They screamed louder than when I told them that they had lice.
"It's so long and thick," I said, looking from one light brown-haired child to another. "There's more of a chance that I'll get more of them out if we cut it."
And so I did. Claire's hair is trimmed to her ears, and Emma's is to her shoulders. She couldn't bear to lose more than that. Christopher...oh that poor boy. I thought, "Hey! He's a boy! I can give him a buzz cut!" No one should ever allow me around clippers. His hair is not only shockingly short, but it's patchy. Looking at that kid's head is like looking at a wheat field with poorly drawn crop circles on it. Who would have thought that trimming a boy's hair would be so difficult?
Trimming my own hair was easier. It felt good actually. After a year or two of all of these crazy emotions and fears - going through the divorce, frantically trying to find a job for months on end, answering REALLY tough questions from the kids, etc, etc. Holding it together has been tough. Maintaing composure is stressful.
"I'm gonna cut my hair," I said, gazing into the bathroom mirror with a mischevous grin that I hadn't seen on myself in a while. Usually I look into the mirror in the morning and say something like, "Everything is going to be ok." But now I was giving myself a sideways smile, the one I would get as a teenager when I painted my toenails black, saying, "And I'm going to cut it as short as I fucking want to."
It felt ceremonious, or tribal somehow. War paint felt appropriate, a sign of my determination and ferocity in my War on Bugs.
But apparently the bugs were slathering their war paint on too. See, I started this blog post two months ago. Every time I think I've gotten rid of those things they pop back up. I think I've finally licked 'em in this last bout, only because now I'm washing, spraying and wiping things down every day.
At least my washer and dryer are working now. Or I would definitely shave our heads. And all of us would go naked from now on. We'd be the hairless, nudist family on the block. But bug-free!
