Be gone

When I disappear for huge chunks of time one can best believe that something is up.  Here's what's up.  Or has been up.  Nits. 

The girls and I were at the pool when I got a text from a friend, the mother of a little girl with whom my girls had been spending a lot of time.  Giving it to me straight, no chaser she told me, "P has lice.  We are on our way to Lice Be Gone."  I have to put it all out there, as a black chick, I'd never come even close to the critters.  Never thought I would.  Since I was a girl, when the school nurse took the tongue depressor/popsicle stick to my classmates' heads in search of the dreaded bugs and their eggs, I'd turn my head as she barely searched.  All that grease, that heat, the braids had convinced us all that BLACK PEOPLE DON'T GET LICE.  (Which we will soon discover is so not true.  Alas, while being black is cool and has its merits, a biological impossibility of getting lice is not one of them. *sigh*) With two years of school cycles back here in the States we'd managed to avoid countless lice warnings and sightings at both of their schools. (I'd never even heard about it in Barbados, but that doesn't mean anything really.)  Just to be fair, I took a cursory glance at the girls' hair, checked behind the ears, along the back of the neck, in the crown and sectioned the strands. I never saw a bug, thank God, but tucked deep into the soft, marshy forest that is the girls' thick curly hair I saw tiny little, gummy dewdrops that were not easy to get off with a flick of the brush.  Nits.  NITS!

With Panic as my middle name, you can best be assured that I grabbed those two cuties by the arms and snatched them away from any and all children.  Their hair, now dripping with chlorinated water looked beautiful, golden from the hours spent in the pool and under the summer sun, sweet, bouncy curls tangling in their eyelashes.  I whispered to them that it was time for us to go because I wanted to get to the local drug store immediately to get the kit and have these "lice be gone!"  The whisper was for naught.  "We have lice?  How did we get it?" Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  My first time.  I'd never experienced what so many others had for years prepared for after camp season, first week of school, and sleepovers.  I wore it as shame and embarrassment.  They as curiosity, interest, nervousness.

"We don't know for sure but we'd damn well better get you off the streets and into the darkness...I mean, home."  I probably didn't swear.  Probably I did.  I did.  Along with the lice shampoo, gel, comb, and bedding spray, I purchased Quick Nits to prevent the return, lots of candy, a movie, and a Barbie or something or other for each.  Not a stuffed animal because I'd already been warned that I'd have to nearly incinerate them in the dryer to kill any lice that might be foolishly trying to snuggle into that fake hairy furriness.  I washed their heads with RidX and slathered some anti-lice gel onto their heads to "aid in the combing out of nits."  Unfortunately for all of us, I had no idea what exactly I was looking for.  Yeah, I'd seen the pictures on line but when confronted with the daunting task of combing through a 500,000 thread count of curly, sandy hair, picking and pulling, searching for tiny whitish, yellowish stickiness strand after strand until my eyes dried shut, I knew I was up against the worst of it.  Because I just couldn't be sure, even after the second course of shampoo and nitpicking, I gave in and convinced the hubby to join me on a trip to Lice Be Gone in the town over.

Lice Be Gone offers a guarantee of lice and nit removal and a follow up for 1/2 the original charge.  With one treatment on shoulder length hair running $250 per head, we were looking at a new iPad, as my husband liked to remind me.  Five hundred dollars for the two girls and $250 if I chose the follow up.  (I think you know which option my cheap ass went with.)  We were looking at peace of mind for ourselves and everyone we do, did, or might spend time with.  At the initial search, Virginie was found to have about thirty-five to forty nits glued to her hair.  Lily was the real shocker that just blew up my mind and I am still piecing it back together.  Lily had over two hundred nits!  Did I not just say that I did two shampoos and nitpicked for hours offering up gifts and snacks and good times?  Two hundred?  It was like I hadn't done a thing.

It appears that the shampoo renders the nits void, but it was my job to pick them out.  Until shown by the staff at Lice Be Gone how to do that, I was really looking for needles in the haystack.  Luckily, the eggs never hatched and we never saw a bug on the head as they could have been walking around like Pig Pen with a halo of lice swarming their dear heads.  A team of two young girls worked on each of the girls' heads with a nit comb and gallons of cheap, white conditioner.  They parted and searched and combed and searched some more.  It took them about an hour and a 1/2 to do the entire treatment--parting, searching, parting, searching--until they were ready to shampoo, recheck, blow-dry, and finally release the people back to the world.  No nits, no bugs, no lice.  Instead of the $250 return trip, we agreed to put Crisco on the girls' heads every Saturday for the next three weeks, cover them with shower caps, and have them wear those for 8 to 10 hours a day.  Who even uses Crisco anymore?  The girls loved it except for the Crisco and the shower caps and wearing them for 8 to 10 hours a day.

We were good and we were safe.  I went back to treating the girls with the kind of product usually reserved for the school year when I put their hair back in ponytails and buns and clips every day.  I had gotten lax in the summer because they were swimming so much.  It had seemed a waste to use all that product and then have them swim it down the drain.  But we were back to product and the occasional olive/tea tree/eucalyptus oil treatment.  I allowed myself to relax, to loosen the PTSD constraints that pulled at me every time I felt an itch or saw one of the girls scratch their heads. 

And then the ground swell rumbling began.  First a call came in from a friend whose daughter had played with Lily and Virginie just the night before.  Outside.  For an hour or so.  Did they touch heads?  Was there head to head contact? I didn't see them touch heads.  Did they?  Were their heads in contact?  While traveling by car on a ten hour trip, my friend had noticed the itching and then bugs, lice! crawling in her daughter's hair.  She had to warn me.  I did the treatment.  Checked their heads.  Freaked and acted like a monkey.  Days later, another friend called to say that her two had been sent home from school ON THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL because they had nits and bugs.  SHE had nits too.  I'd been coating the girls in olive oil since Saturday's treatment and checking their heads daily pulling everything that was small, flaky, white, grey, blue, pink and not hair so I felt alright except not really.  And then my neighbor whose daughter is Virginie's BFF called to tell me that hers too had lice.  Bugs.  Crawling.  She'd shaved her boys' heads to the quick and started checking on the girl.  There was shampooing, nitpicking, oiling.  It seemed that everyone knew someone who was doing the same damned thing.

I finally cracked.  "Black people night not get lice," I thought/prayed, "but I'd better treat myself too."  I didn't want to be trolling the house with lice, infecting the girls, especially after all that treatment.  Though I'd never seen anything on my head through any of the outbreak, I itched any time anyone said lice or nits.  I checked my head until it hurt.  I thought I saw a little bug in the sink after one of the comb outs only to find that it was a tiny ball at the end of the spiral brush bristle that fell off.  I did the treatment, scrubbed and nitpicked and found nothing.  I shaved the hubby's head down to "Marine Corp." pronounced "MAH-rins Cor-P" and washed all the laundry, anything soft really, and bleach-sponged every surface in the house.

We've seen ten nits and safely removed them.  They slept in shower caps and slumber caps with their hair coated in oils.  I have nitpicked and nitpicked and am now convinced I may have a future as a lice checker.  There is no itching.  But what there is is a sadness at the shame, the anxiety, the stress that these little blood sucking creatures caused me, my friends and neighbors, and probably countless others who hid away, fearing too that they were Patient Zero, the cause of a "chicken-or-the-egg" scenario if ever there was one.  Anyone can get lice.  Clean or dirty, rich or poor, from any ethnic background.  The owner of Lice Be Gone told me on that first visit, "If you know people who haven't had lice yet it's just because they are lucky."  Reassuring.  I think the outbreaks are becoming epidemic and can't even begin to guess why.  For this poor OCD/PTSD mother nitpicking has been added to the color coordinated clothes hanging in the closet, playroom straightening, housecleaning, lock checking (car and house) as one of the daily rituals. 

My friend told me that the search for Patient Zero is futile and invites an advanced level Blame Game that serves no one.  She's right.  It doesn't matter to me how it starts.  It's how it ends.  And so far, it's ended well.  The lice be gone.  ;-)


(c) Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.