by Anonymous Guest Author Not Me
Lots of times my kids have had other kids (strangers, none of your kids I'm sure) with lice in their classes and they have come home with a raging case of mental lice. Head itching like nobody's business and nothing to show for it.
However, sometimes kids complain and complain and some anonymous parents are sure it's a mental ailment and then quit paying attention to that ceaseless whining. Sometimes something is actually wrong and those certain parents feel really badly. This may have happened to us just this week. And perhaps there were a hundred small brown bugs collectively crawling through my four children's lovely locks. So our case of mental lice, according to the liceologist that we saw, turns out to be, well, not just in our heads, actually on our heads. Embarrassing. That's why I'm writing this under a pseudonym. None of y'all know us so whatever...
I personally have never had lice and being pretty confident that I was immune I was pretty chill about this whole thing. Until the vermin caught up with me. And then I quickly became a sOCD mess. Because I found out that lice is evil and nasty and becoming eviler and nastier. Like that Frontline stuff that doesn't work in dogs anymore, I learned that your regular CVS stuff is both terrible for your health and non-functional. And when you have three kids with long and very thick hair, the idea of picking bugs and pulling eggs off of individual strands of hair for a month is enough to spur an acute onset of carpal tunnel.
And I also learned that there are people braver than I in this world - clever people who have capitalized on this nefarious bug, it's extreme resilience, parent's excessive disgust and our society's desire for speed - and they have built business empires on the scalps of schoolchildren and campers. Empires that I have come to appreciate.
So we went to these clever and entrepreneurial masterminds. Piled in the car, scratching like dogs, and sat in their seats for the assessment. Try to deny all you like but if someone pulls a bunch of bugs off of your kids head and then asks if you want them to fix it, you are blinded by the need for the nightmare to end and you act. You say yes. Almost without thinking. And that's what I did. I said yes. In a weird awkward loud voice. And with each successive diagnosis I squeaked "yes". And "yes please" and "holy crap yes". I may have even once said "do you even have to ask?!"
And this is how we, in under 10 hours, eliminated lice from our heads and our home. We spent almost all of those hours on diagnosing, combing, drying stuffed animals on high heat and giving $812.56 to the people who tortured our children to the point of tears and snot for hours on end. We left there lice free and giving each and every one of you and our friends and family the generous gift that we have so often ourselves enjoyed - the gift of mental lice.
Mental lice is the feeling that you have lice. It's a little itch behind the ears. It's the cautious checking of a bank account to see if there are $812.56 delousing dollars in the emergency fund. It is perhaps a brushing off of a shoulder or a pillow case. And for us, mental lice has always been a hilarious laugh. And now it's not. Sorry y'all - welcome to the school year - aren't you glad you don't know us?