#98, Lice likes

You know how many times I heard about lice this week? Several. No offense, but I thought some of you could use this post from 2017 when Alice and I got lice.

Nitwits Belmont closed during the pandemic. If you get lice now and want a professional comb-out you’ll have to go to Lice Aunties in Newton.

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Not everyone gets the itch but if you do you’ll know. You won’t know-know because you’ll tell yourself you’re wrong but oh, come on, at least in retrospect. Lice went around preschool a couple weeks ago + now your kid is scratching her head again + it’s not the immediate itch you get when you just think about lice, it’s an itch that comes and goes even when you’re not thinking about lice. It’s lice! You have it.

I mean, I have it, and so does Alice.

I had noticed she was scratching her head a lot and after a couple days of ignoring it — because preschool already HAD lice and I’d already sprayed her head once with an easy, natural spray I bought on Amazon and obviously that had done the trick, it was no work but had so many 5-star reviews, so fine, everyone just settle down with all of your instructions about nit-picking, use the spray, never think about it again — Monday night when I was in bed I just, you know, started thinking about it. Around 11 PM I went downstairs and started rustling around in the bathroom cabinet for the comb that had come with our bottle of miracle lice spray. I combed my hair a little and seemed to see something small and brown, shaped like a teeny tiny sesame seed, caught in the teeth of the comb. I stood in there for awhile. I showed it to Kevin and then went back upstairs and fell into an extremely deep sleep induced by just not wanting to think about lice for a few hours. In the morning, I combed my hair again and this time found a very tiny thing with legs that moved when I put it on a Kleenex. I checked Alice’s head and saw shit in there besides the usual sand and glitter.

She was SO HAPPY when she found out that she and I were staying home. I called in sick and found a lice removal place called Nitwits not far from us. It was 8 AM and when the woman answered the phone she sounded very sleepy but she was quickly all business. We made an appointment for noon.

In the meantime Alice and I had a couple free hours so we went to the playground. It was sunny and beautiful and unseasonably warm, and the playground was filled with babies and toddlers. For the first time in Alice’s life, the thought struck me that she was supposed to be in school and it was going to seem a little bit weird to others that she wasn't. Then again, maybe I was just extremely conscious of what everybody was going to be thinking of us for, you know, other reasons.

But Alice isn’t used to being out at the playground with me on a weekday either. “Mom, maybe these other kids are also here because they are having a home day because they also have bugs in their hair!” she said. Her voice was so loud, so clear. We stopped near the gate and I bent down and suggested that we not talk about the lice at the playground. Actually that wasn’t what I said. I said, in the sharp tone that I use when I want her to *REALLY LISTEN* to me but that she seems to just hear and react to as my 100% regular voice, “We can’t go to the playground if you’re going to talk about the lice. Do you hear me? You just can’t talk to other people about it.”

“Why?”

“Well, because it’s a little bit gross.”

“It’s not gross, Mom. It’s nice.”

We stayed away from other people and went on swings, probably swinging all the lice out of our hair, hopefully. We still had about an hour until our Nitwits appointment so I said that we could walk and get a donut. We walked along, no stroller, just one kid to worry about. It felt like we were playing hooky, and it was kind of pleasant.

“Mom, why is Katie allowed to wear princess dresses to school?” Katie (not actual name) is her best friend.

“Different families allow different things,” I said. We have this conversation once a day, at least. Today, though, it took on new levels. It was just us girls and we could have new, more complex mom-daughter conversations. I said more things about how different families have different rules and it's all fine.

“I wish that Katie and I could trade families,” she said.

“No! You can’t do that, because then I would miss you. It would be too sad.”

“It wouldn’t be sad, Mom. It would be exciting.”

Nitwits was an unmarked brick building in Belmont with white shades pulled down and no sign whatsoever, just a few pamphlets in a box on the door. It looked like a hair salon if you wanted nobody to know what your hair salon was or to be able to see what was going on inside. It looked like what it was, I suppose. Inside I felt a sense of relief like walking into a hotel room at the end of 24 hours of travel.

We went into a smaller private room — like where you go to get a bikini wax — with a woman named Karen who had clear sparkling blue eyes and was nice enough to act so happy when we arrived. In the room was a DVD player, for which Alice could choose DVDs including Moana and Frozen, and an iPad. The WiFi password was taped onto the wall. I wondered, if I didn’t have a child with me, if I would have the balls to just screw around on my phone for the entire time it took someone to comb lice out of my hair. Or crack open a book.

Because it takes a long fucking time to get lice combed out of your hair. I went first. Karen showed us an instructional DVD that was created by the woman who owns Nitwits. It was amazing. It was the only thing I wanted to watch at that moment. As if someone knew, just KNEW without me saying, all my concerns about lice and all the ways that lice made me feel as a mother and took each of those insecurities and just annihilated them, one by one, like a mind reader.

Some of the topics this DVD covered: When someone mentions lice and your head starts itching immediately, it’s called “delusional parasitosis.” Moms are more likely to get lice from their kids than dads because moms are shorter than dads and they get their kids closer to their heads; in addition, depending on how pissed you are about having lice, you might think other things about the fact that moms get lice more than dads.

The DVD referred several times to “mom life stress.” It said that there is, wrongly, a stigma attached to head lice. Head lice don’t cary disease. They’re very common in school-age kids. They spread via head-to-head contact. They can’t live on stuffed animals or pillows or clothes; they get cold and die. You don’t have to vacuum everything and put all your stuff in a bag. I loved the DVD. I wish you all could watch it. It would almost be worth getting lice just to watch it. I briefly considered stealing it, just because of the odd dream-like nature of it. It was narrated by a woman who sounded as if she were half-asleep, but very relaxing, sort of like one of those ASM videos, if I were into that. Was it perhaps even the person I had talked to on the phone that morning?

The one strange thing about the video was that it repeatedly stressed that there is AND SHOULD BE a stigma associated with body lice. Karen cut in at this point to tell me that I wouldn’t have body lice “unless you’ve been in a refugee camp.” The DVD also, at this point, showed a photo of a refugee camp. The sheet we took home with us said, “Head Lice do not deserve the stigma associated with them. The stigma IS appropriate for Body Lice, genetically distinct from Head Lice.” I began thinking about the many “Refugees Welcome” signs I have seen around Cambridge. I imagined coming into Nitwits with body lice and being turned away. Then Karen started dividing my hair into sections with her comb and drenching it with conditioner and sprinkling it with baking powder (for traction) and wiping what she found in it onto a paper towel.

The other good thing about treating lice is you can use as much paper towel as you want and you don’t have to feel like you’re wasting it. It’s necessary, because you have to wipe the comb onto the paper towel in order to be able to see the nits through the conditioner. 

The phrase “big pharma” came up several times in the three hours that we were there. (Also, the conditioner that they used, which cost $45 for a large bottle and we didn’t buy it, was promoted on the DVD as "vegan and gluten-free.") It was a little bit like when I used to listen to people talking about natural breastfeeding versus bad Big Formula and would just get sucked into a vortex of spiraling thoughts, each making less sense than the last. It seems different in this case because the shampoos maybe, actually, really are dangerous and don’t work (but am I just being brainwashed?) and it really is better for you to just comb your hair out — even though it’s so, so, so, much work — and it’s definitely better and healthier for your kid — although, I mean, where’s the science on it? It is breastfeeding versus formula all over again, except anyone can do the combing. I mean, maybe not everybody has time, though, and it’s kind of a luxury to just be combing out your hair (plus we paid $400) and — well, you see how my mind was going with this. And it could go and go and go because Alice was being freakishly patient, quietly reading books to herself and not asking me or Karen for anything. For the two hours it took to do my hair. The place had cast a spell on us, and I definitely went home and wrote a 5-star Yelp review, as requested. I did not, however, like it on Facebook, which was the other suggestion

Alice had WAY more lice than I did, by the way. “So, these are multi-generational,” Karen said, showing them to me on a paper towel.

After three hours, we stumbled out into the sun and the dreamlike nature of the day evaporated. We're doing the comb-outs at home ourselves now, every other day until we have had three nit-free comb-outs in a row. Alice loves the comb-outs because she gets to have candy and sit in front of the TV during them. Driving to school this morning, when we were almost there, she said, “I hate to say goodbye.”

“I miss you when you're at school, too,” I said.

“No, I hate to say goodbye to my candy at home.”