Dining with Squirrels

It’s a good thing I didn’t try to write this yesterday.  Well, actually, I did try, but it was a post so full of wallowing self-pity and irritation that I might have alienated the Reader.  I was certainly alienating myself.  I was not a chipper chippy.

Ben has lice again.  A mere 3 months since the last time.  I discovered this at dinner the other night as Ben frantically scratched his head.  A primitive alarm sounded in my brain and, leaning over, to cursorily inspect him, I saw a louse.  Whoever said they’re hard to find may perhaps have not seen one. They’re BUGS.

And, as with our previous lousy experience, I was immediately taken with a deep calm.  Patton-like, I ordered the children up from the table.  We’re off to Auntie Lorilyn’s house to borrow the Magic Nit Comb!  We’ll stop at Walgreens for gum!  Everything will be okay!!

We were up combing until 10:15pm.  And I maintained my calm and assured facade until the kids were asleep.  Then I laid in bed until 1am, imagining bugs crawling on my face.  By yesterday afternoon, I’d washed 15 loads of laundry, vacuumed the couches and the beds, combed heads for at least 4 hours and spent the day with my head wrapped in olive oil and saran wrap.  A saran and oil prophylactic.  I was completely exhausted.  And this is when I thought I might post a blog entry.  It was very sad.

In fact, so sad that I couldn’t do it.  I wouldn’t do it.  The kids and I had been in the house all day.  This olive oil treatment is supposed to smother lice, but it takes a while.   The kids watched 3 movies and chewed a lot of gum.   I’ve been re-reading this book called The Lonely Patient by Michael Stein.  And while having lice is not an illness, Stein’s words do describe some of what I was feeling yesterday:  “Illness arrives, literally, out of nowhere. … makes [us] feel out of place, unaccountably absent, far outside existence.  The patient…soon feels taken over, trapped, imprisoned.” That’s what 3 movies, endless gum, and lice will do to a girl.  And trying to write from that place is humiliating because all I have to offer — anytime I really feel bad and strangely feel the urge to write about it — is something that disgusts me.

This is all to say that I spared you and myself and instead packed a picnic dinner and took the kids to a park.  It was a remarkable piece of self-care, I tell you.  I’m usually  really, really bad at self-care.  And I was rewarded for my bravery.  It was a beautiful night, the air the same temperature as our bodies, as if we were one with trees and dirt around us.  There were lots of kids in the park and Ben and Lucy took off, giving their legs and arms a whirl.  They still work!  I just sat and listened to the murmur of parents talking and kids imagining and the distant thwack of a kickball game in the field nearby.  Ben and Lucy played for an hour before they came for their dinner.  We ate companionably, in the evening light, and the day felt far away.

Last night, I was able to be thankful.  Thankful that I found the lice.  Thankful that I could stay calm.  Thankful that my children have incredibly thin hair.  Thankful that lice are not an illness, that they will go, and we are being returned to the world.