Introduction
I have a tradition of mailing out a highly unconventional
holiday newsletter. The original setup
was to figure out the most humiliating thing I’d done all year and describe it
in excruciating detail. Some years I
satirized the newsletter form itself, by making myself or my family out to
be egomaniacal, or claiming to be really disappointed in my kids. After the family
editorial panel (i.e., my wife) censored a couple of editions (such as this one), I toned things down a bit.
Here’s the edition from 2011, which I didn’t originally post
to this blog for fear of embarrassing my family. However, I have decided to post it now, and
you are free to read it if you’ll promise me one thing: whether or not you get to the end, please
scroll down and read the epilogue, added today.
(Obviously I have no way to hold you to this promise. You’re on the honor system.)
From the Archives –
December 2011 Holiday Newsletter
Season’s Greetings!
I’ve been doing these newsletters for awhile now and I know
the drill: a quick recap of the year,
some tidbits about how the kids are progressing, perhaps a wistful observation
about the treadmill of time, etc. But
this year I’m struggling, as I’ve become fixated on a specific topic and cannot
focus on anything else. So I better just
get that topic out of the way to free up my brain for the more standard
tidings.
The topic is head lice.
I’m quite certain that for the rest of my life, whenever I look back at
2011 I’ll think, “Oh, yeah, the year we all got infested.” Oh, go ahead and snicker. I always used to, when I’d hear about some
kid failing his lice spot-check at school. Actually, I’d snicker but also wince,
acknowledging (but not really believing) that my kid could be next. Why do we snicker? Probably out of contempt. Everybody knows that having lice means you’re
filthy. Not just filthy, but a filthy
outsider. Who can consider the word
“lice” without immediately thinking of all those immigrants being quarantined
at Staten Island after failing their lice checks? (As it turns out, it’s an unfair
stereotype. Lice actually prefer a nice
clean scalp to a dirty, oily one. I know, I know:
sounds exactly like what a louse-infested troll would say.)
Fortunately, my kids didn’t fail a spot-check at
school. Erin discovered the lice
herself. Of course that doesn’t make the
infestation any less disgusting, but at least we were spared some
disgrace. (When your scalp is teeming
with parasites you get pretty good at looking at the bright side.) I don’t know how Erin happened to spot the
lice, though once she pointed them out I couldn’t not see them. The eggs had amassed into something like a
cobweb woven into our child’s scalp.
Erin extracted a full-grown louse, teasing it with a toothpick until its
bloodlust led it to climb on, perhaps en route to Erin’s own locks. She flung the louse into the sink and the
little bastard was so engorged with our daughter’s blood that it exploded on
impact, the blood gradually oozing toward the drain, like a Sam Peckinpah
vignette in miniature.
I rapidly began a cycle of grief, skipping right past denial
(I mean, how could I deny this?) and going directly to anger. I vowed to exterminate these lice with
extreme prejudice. I told Erin, “If the
lice bring knives, we’re bringing guns.
If they bring guns, we’re bringing napalm. It is on.” Actually I probably said something less
macho. Likely I was silent for a spell
as the heebie-jeebies hit me full on.
Once you’ve seen lice in the hair of your beloved offspring—the same
offspring you snuggle with on a regular basis—you cannot help but feel the
awful tickly sensation of hundreds of lice in your own hair. You begin scratching your head like a
maniac. Your body goes through series of
shudders from the head down.
I was serious about the no-holds-barred warfare,
though. The trouble is, a parent can’t just
decide things unilaterally. I had to
convince Erin to bring out the big guns, which was challenging because she won’t
even take Advil for a headache. We
discussed the matter at length and researched all manner of home remedies and
commercial anti-lice products. Finally
it came down to a binary choice: either
we use RID, an expensive but market-leading anti-lice shampoo, or nothing.
In the event, Erin deftly slipped between the horns of the
dilemma by buying RID but not using it.
Her rationale, based on the fine print she read on the box, was that some
strains of lice are impervious to RID, and she didn’t want to risk irritating
our kids’ scalps if the shampoo wasn’t even a sure thing. I hit upon a strategy of trying it out on
myself to see if it’s hard on the scalp, but then I read the even finer print
and discovered that you shouldn’t use it if you’re allergic to ragweed, which I
just so happen to be. Erin did use the
chintzy plastic lice comb that it came with, so at least we couldn’t return the
RID.
Lice infestation is hard on a marriage. It ended up falling to Erin to comb out the
kids’ hair looking for nits (eggs or leftover egg casings), nymphs (immature
lice—isn’t this disgusting?), and adult lice.
She decided she had to be the one to do it because I was obviously
useless at it, being unable to find anything on her head. Since I’m normally pretty good at detail
work, she took my incompetence to be a sign of not trying, and, by extension, of
not caring. Of course, she couldn’t find
anything on my head either, but she figured that was because I have too little
hair left for a louse to bother with.
Since she couldn’t do her own lice check, Erin found a head
lice spa to go to. It took me by
surprise that such a business could exist, but of course I should have
known. Off Erin went to this insanely
expensive place where they gave her green tea, played New Age music, said
soothing things, and petted her head a lot.
They offer no guarantee of any kind that their techniques are
effective. (If this had been a business
catering to guys it’d be like smogging your car, where there’s a money-back
guarantee.) About the only good thing I
can say about the spa is that the lousseuse told Erin, “You owe your husband an
apology. I can’t find anything
either.” She finally ended up finding
one little speck that could have been a nit.
Of course, it could have been a fleck of sawdust, the broken-off tip of
an eyelash, or something the lousseuse herself planted there. She sent Erin home with a gorgeous stainless
steel designer lice comb.
Thus began a nightly ritual of Erin getting the kids’ hair
wet and running the lice comb through their scalps, squinting at the
varicolored specks that would be dislodged, and cursing the whole affair. I cannot fathom how the term “nitpicking”
came to mean “showing too much concern with insignificant details” because
ridding our scalps of nits now seemed all-important. We took other measures
too. For example, I put Lindsay’s teddy
bear, in a gallon-size Ziploc, in the freezer overnight. Whether due to the cold or because I forgot
to leave an air hole, when I retrieved the bear in the morning it was dead. Please don’t tell Lindsay. I also froze my helmet pads, and we did
outrageous, climate-changing amounts of laundry. Erin even decided, in a particularly frantic
moment, to give Alexa a short haircut.
Alexa was fairly stoic about this, but poor Lindsay was heartbroken about
the loss of her heroic big sister’s glorious long locks. (I felt sheepish witnessing this show of
sympathy. When I was a kid, I always
took great pleasure in my brothers’ misfortunes.)
Perhaps our most disturbing treatment was slathering our
heads in über-expensive lotion and then wrapping them in plastic shower caps,
which we’d seal up tight like gaskets, before bed. All night, every time your head would move,
there’d be this crackling, ripping sound like a martial arts guy makes. The idea is to suffocate the adult lice,
terrify the nymphs, and poach the eggs.
Or something like that; I was never that clear on what louse phase this
treatment targeted. All I know is that
you have to destroy the lice in all their life stages or the cycle will never
end.
If you ever find yourself with a family-wide lice infestation, don’t expect any sympathy from friends ... mine just seemed completely grossed out. A colleague instant-messaged me one morning
and said, “How’s the treatment going?” I
wrote back, “Lousy.” I thought I’d at
least get an LOL out of that, but nothing.
No sense of humor on this sordid topic.
We’d discovered the lice in February, and over the next four
months we went through everything from despondent denial (“The lice must be gone by now”), to paralysis (“I
know the kids have lice but I’m too tired to deal with it”), to fear (“Could
this lotion be hard on the kids’ skin?”), to fury (see above), and then to
resignation: “We won’t be rid of the
lice until summer because everybody at the school must have it.”
So what finally worked?
Well, I’d like to edify you with the inspiring tale of how we finally
won the War On Lice, but the fact is, we never did prevail. In the end, the lice just left us. It was like we suddenly weren’t good enough
for them anymore. Of course we were
relieved, but I had to work through some abandonment issues. Plus, we still can’t believe they’re really
gone: every itch becomes a tickle that
spawns paranoia, and just last night Erin was combing Lindsay’s hair after a
bath and suddenly said, “You’ve got to be kidding me. That better not be lice.”
Well, I see I’m out of room.
I had meant to write more, and on some cheerier topics, but that’s how
it goes. All of us Alberts wish you a wonderful,
parasite-free holiday!
Epilogue
Well, the lice did
come back—in full force. In despair, we
hired a lice removal specialist who made house calls. If you think this sounds expensive, you’re
exactly right. But we (i.e., Erin) just didn’t
have the energy to do the combing anymore, and were sick of failing at it. Well, the expert went at somebody’s head for
about five minutes and announced, “There’s no lice here.” Erin, disbelieving, located some lice on the head in question and pointed it out. “That’s not lice, that’s dandruff,”
the expert said. She brought out some
samples of actual lice, in little Ziploc bags, and showed us. Sure enough, Erin hadn’t been seeing anything
like that on anyone’s head. Thus was solved the mystery of how we were
never able to get rid of the lice—they simply never existed (other than the
single blood-gorged louse we’d found early on).
So did I mention this in the next year’s holiday newsletter,
or mail around an addendum? Nope. I guess all our friends and family believe,
to this day, that we’re a bunch of filthy outsiders spreading this hideous
plague across our community. Oh well.
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