Now that it is behind me, now that I am back to washing hair on a regular schedule, now that we can let the sheets stay on the bed for more than 24 hours, I think I can breathe. I think I can write about it.
I tried a few times before but I guess I was still too deep in the process of eradication to be able to tell the story of how lice invaded my life and somehow managed to teach me something. For me, in any hardship there has to be a lesson. Otherwise, what's the point? This lesson was not as clean as I wanted it to be, but then again, lice are not exactly clean.
What they do is force you to be fiercely clean. As a family we have never been cleaner. Normally I don't put much value on cleanliness. I'd rather save water than be squeaky clean and I don't believe in washing clothes after one wearing. But when the lice came, we had to change our habits. We had to wash our hair every day, and comb it with a magnifying glass nearby. We had to put our clothes directly in to the washing machine at the end of the day. We had to wash our sheets when we got out of bed in the morning. Towels had to be washed after each use. Our house became one big cleaning cycle. Everything, including our bodies, was in a tight and constant cycle of wash, dry and fold. Every inch of all of our heads were under constant scrutiny. Eradication was the goal and we were determined to reach it be any means necessary. If there were a more brutal solution we would not have hesitated to embrace it, but there really is only one solution: Constant cleansing.
Constant cleansing got old after a few days but there was no vacation. We had to keep going. After the first full week of it, as I was losing all sense of time and who I was anymore, Dave admitted that it was starting to get to him too. The kids were watching movie after movie, sometimes several a day as we spent hours on hair treatments and the endless combing combing combing. It was hard on them too. Especially Grace who had to spend twenty minutes every morning in the office for more scrutinizing before being admitted to school.
Constant cleansing. As I started to accept that we were being forced to change our habits I realized how hard that is. And it seems to be cropping up in every aspect of my life. I am having to change my posture to correct back problems. I have to change the way I deal with money because it's long overdue. I have to change the way I talk to my children because they are growing up. I have to change the way I engage in conversation because I am no longer willing to gossip. All of these aspects of my life (and the list goes on) are going through a lot of scrutiny and cleansing. I am finding that in order to really live my life the way I want to, I have to really change everything. Because as my teacher loves to say, "How you do anything is how you do everything," so if I'm going to change anything, I have to change everything. And that is what the lice had to teach me.
