I might have had head lice… once…
I’ve received at least 10 letters a year from my kids’ school about pediculosis—a fancy but rather ugly word for that pesky little critter that haunts parents every time school starts. My oldest managed to make it to high school without bringing home that nasty stuff that makes even the most psychologically stable people scratch the back of their heads just thinking about it…
Then my daughter, when she was nearing the end of elementary school—just when I thought we were in the clear—came home with a letter addressed to the parents of a class in crisis. The message pleaded with us to check our child’s scalp one more time, given that the problem was growing among the group of 26 students. A little voice inside me chimed in to warn me that this time might be THE time… But as a mother of two, I’ve learned not to always listen to the warning signs, because my dashboard It's pretty much the same as an old 1995 Bazou that hasn't had an oil change in two years! It lights up like a Christmas tree, and often I just pretend everything's fine because...anyway There's always something off… But that one time, I should have paid attention… I waited until the next day. I mean, nobody was itching!
The next day, driven by a sense of urgency and armed with my comb, a piece of white paper, and a tenacity worthy of a chimpanzee mother, I attacked my youngest daughter’s head, finding after only a few minutes of searching what nearly drove me crazy… Like a soldier on a strategic mission, my boyfriend headed to the pharmacy on a reconnaissance mission and came back with the treatment from hell—some kind of lice-killing oil you have to leave on your head for several hours!
The next day, my oldest son, coming home from school, said the words I dreaded most: “I think I have lice—it’s itching…” An expert-level “chimpanzee,” I combed through my younger son’s hair, fully realizing that the mission had only just begun! Bam! Lice! Mission No. 2 for the man: my second trip to the pharmacy to get that dreadful treatment.
Here I am with my whole household in quarantine, my couch cushions in airtight bags on the porch, and the washing machine handling the 1,000 loads it takes to wash everything made of fabric—and believe me, even though it might not seem like much, there’s actually quite a lot of it in a house…
But that’s when I start losing my mind… I’m going crazy too… that’s for sure… Looking like a girl having a psychotic episode, I ask my boyfriend to check my head. The thing is, he doesn’t have his chimpanzee diploma; he’s past the stage of being Raton the Friend or Inspector Gadget without his dog and niece—in short, he’s hopeless! After two minutes, he declares: “Clear“You don’t have lice, honey!” I was practically freaking out and snapped, “Look properly—I’m sure I do…” … After two hours of arguing, my boyfriend limped off to the pharmacy for the third time to bring me back that devilish liquid… You’d have to be pretty desperate—I couldn’t wait for him to come back with that cursed oil, and I was ready to bathe in it if I had to.
Then that’s when I really start to lose it—times 1,000—when he hands me the bottle… The thing is, my hair goes all the way down to my butt, but the pharmacy gives me the same amount as they do for my daughter, whose hair is shoulder-length. So I vent my frustration about the poor pharmacist to my boyfriend, who realizes it’s better to just listen—and above all, say nothing. I slather this stinky stuff on my hair, using up the last drops from bottles originally meant for my kids’ treatments. What a shitty night—I can’t even tell you! “Ifelt"like a leper!"
I’ve never found a single damn louse in my hair, so I’ll never know if I really had any. We wiped out the enemy in a single mission, but just thinking about it makes my head itch. Once you’ve had lice, you know that in war, it’s not the size of the enemy that matters, but how much they mess with your head!