We’ve been battling the plagues at our house. Santa brought us lice on Christmas Eve, January delivered gum surgery and the stomach flu, and Valentine’s Day brought us lice, rats and incontinent cats. I’ve never been that fond of Valentine’s Day but the holiday hit a new low when, after picking through my child’s head for nits, I found myself face to face with a huge rat while cleaning up my cat’s urine.
I’ve spent the past couple months deciding whether or not to speak openly about my kids getting lice. After our first lice outbreak on Christmas Eve, I was pretty adamant about not mentioning it on Facebook lest our friends deem our kids and house dirty and decide to reassess whether or not to let their kids play with ours. I felt ashamed, like I hadn’t done a good enough job keeping my kids clean even though I know and all the literature says that lice has nothing to do with poor hygiene and social status.
When the second outbreak hit, something inside of me broke—in a good way. I stopped caring about what people may think about my kids or my home—or more appropriately, I stopped projecting my insecurities about lice onto others. I still neurotically scrubbed the crap out of my house for six hours straight, spent a back breaking three hours hunched over my daughter’s head and created roughly 40 loads of laundry in one week from all of the sheet stripping, jacket cleaning and towel and clothing isolation. I spent another series of back breaking hours checking my kids’ heads for lice again, and again, and again. Gah, my head itches just writing about it.
I was pretty uptight and meticulous about not sharing hats and brushes when I was a kid. I would have been mortified if I ever got lice while growing up. I irrationally believed only dirty kids got lice and I was not a dirty kid. When I finally got lice at age 24 while travelling through Israel and living on a Moshav with a bunch of hippy, orthodox Jews (for the record, I am pretty certain we picked up the lice from a nasty hostel in the Old City), I felt pretty depressed. I was aghast when the host of the house we were staying in said something to the affect of, “When I get lice…” to which my immediate response was, “There is no ‘when’ in this situation.” In my opinion, “getting lice” would be a one.time.occurrence.only.period.
During that “one time occurrence,” Scott and I spent three days rotating our clothes to give enough time for the eggs and adults to die. Hot water and a decent shower were scarce and there was no washer or dryer on the Moshav, so we had to continue sleeping in our sleeping bags despite the fact they were contaminated. We slept with our hair soaked in a rosemary olive oil concoction and our heads wrapped in pink plastic shopping bags—a look I wanted to document on film for such an occasion like writing about it in a blog 14 years later, but Scott made threats and refused my photo attempts. We finally ended up hitchhiking to Jerusalem where we visited the first pharmacy we could find and used sign language (me scratching my head furiously at the lady behind the counter) to signal that we needed a bottle of strong pesticides for our heads.
Now a veteran at delousing my children and surviving two outbreaks in eight weeks, I’ve wearily come to realize that lice is just a part of growing up. For the kids, it was an annoying chore that required stuffed animals to be banished to quarantine and periods of time sitting still in front of movies while I got all chimpanzee mama-like on their heads with a nit comb. But for me, it was a learning experience. I’ve learned to trust that most people aren’t shallow enough to ostracize a child over something as simple as lice. They’ve either gotten it as kids or have kids who’ve had it. More likely, nobody wants one of those stray, miniscule bugs to lay a bunch of eggs on their kid’s head, only to have them hatch and unleash at least two weeks worth of meticulous cleaning upon their house. We parents don’t have time for that. I have decided that if the deliverer of plagues were to give me a choice between the stomach flu and lice, I would choose the stomach flu, any day.
I have also learned that lice isn’t a topic people talk about—probably for the same reason I was hesitant to discuss my own experience. If the literature online has to state that …”getting lice isn’t a result of poor hygiene and social status,” then you can pretty much deduce that it is a common assumption for both misconceptions to be correct. No wonder I felt ashamed.
