Julie Jay: This week my husband’s PTSD was triggered by the return of a tiny comb
The news that headlice has been detected in school is, of course, the stuff of every parent’s nightmares. I had visions of myself once more fishing out that ridiculously tiny comb and wrestling my three clients (man of the house included) into submission.
Not for the first time, Number One triumphantly presented the printed letter carefully tucked into his Paw Patrol schoolbag. Scanning it, the words ‘míolta cinn’ jumped out at me, and I knew the next couple of days would not be for the fainthearted.
The news that headlice has been detected in school is, of course, the stuff of every parent’s nightmares. I had visions of myself once more fishing out that ridiculously tiny comb and wrestling my three clients (man of the house included) into submission.
Blissfully unaware of what this letter was saying, my husband had to be informed that the word ‘míolta’ did not, in fact, mean thanks a million, but rather announced a case of headlice in class.
“Oh no,” he groaned and proceeded to describe his PTSD, having endured the lice medication back in the early ‘90s, a time when many of us had our heads shoved in front of Glenroe while our mothers went ‘scorched earth’ on our scalps.
At the sight of the tiny comb, the other half was visibly shaken, and it was all it took for me to prevent him from going under the kitchen table and rocking back and forth. I don’t blame him.
I never know how to approach the headlice thing, but I was recently pulled up on this by a friend who insisted she had always played it straight with her crowd and told them when there were nits in their midst.
“Does it not ever freak them out, though?” I asked, worried that announcing the ‘L’ word would somehow plant the seeds of an imagined itch in the scalp of my firstborn, and then where would we be?
“Oh, my eldest refused to go to school for a week after I told her the first time,” my friend mused. “But she’s better off knowing the truth.”
I’m not saying my friend is wrong on this, but I think we can all admit there are exceptions to this rule.
For example, when chatting about polar bears with children, we omit the bit where the icecaps are melting, and when chatting about “special” shampoos, we omit the bit about tiny insects taking up residence in our tiny person’s hair.
And so it was that I told Number One we were going to play a fun game called: ‘Let mammy inspect my scalp’, for no particular reason other than the craic of it. Nothing untoward appeared to be happening, but I felt paranoid for the rest of the evening, worrying that at any moment, a tiny insect was going to crawl down my forehead, down my prominent nose and into my mouth, where it would be ingested and then crawl out my ear again with the whole process repeated indefinitely.
The following day, the English translation of the previous day’s letter came home in the Paw Patrol bag, which only seemed to hammer home the point that a zero-tolerance policy must apply when it comes to nits.
I am always one to second guess myself, and between that and my dislike of hospitals, I would have made me a terrible doctor. Because of this plague of perennial self-doubt, I assumed that this note had been specifically directed at me and so trudged off to the chemist for a treatment for my invisible lice.
Despite being unable to locate any lice-type clues in either of my children’s scalps, I decided to use the shampoo just in case, combing through row after row of hair despite their protestations. The pharmaceutical assistant I had consulted that day also told me in no uncertain terms that treating a non-lice-invested scalp was effectively redundant, but so is my gym membership, and that doesn’t stop me from renewing my subscription every month.
In a final bid to make sure we hadn’t missed any offending eggs, I relented to my little fella’s requests for a haircut and headed off to our old friend Mr Barber if for no other reason than it meant I could get fresh eyes on his scalp. I was starting to doubt my own judgement whether I was just wilfully not seeing these elusive critters.
Thankfully, it was confirmed that he was headlice-free, but while we were there, it made sense to get a trim. This time, I let Number One dictate his requirements, given that I’m totally out of step with what the naíonara kids are rocking these days. He was suitably direct with his directions and requested a very general ‘short,’ so he emerged from the barber officially headlice-free and utterly unrecognisable.
The look was so different that I’m fairly sure most people we encountered just presumed we had been placed in a witness protection plan, but Number One was beyond thrilled with his new style. “I can feel my neck,” he announced ecstatically as if he hadn’t been fully sure what had connected his head to his shoulders up to that point.
Not only could Number One feel his neck, but I could also see his neck, and finally allowed myself to believe that we were minus any possible lice infestations.
When ridding our lives of lice, I may adopt an extreme approach, but unlike my approach to decluttering my knickers drawers, I am nothing if not comprehensive.
