Lousy Gifts 

Brenda Hartman-Souder 

“My head itches!” exclaimed Valerie, for the umpteenth time that evening. We were watching “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” our special Friday night activity. Our seven-year-old loves to try and answer the questions correctly. She relishes making a decision with the contestants and yelling, “Final answer!” to her selection. But that night she was distracted by an itchy scalp.

Greg had also been scratching his head for several weeks. We’d taken a perfunctory look and found nothing. Mark, my calm, unruffled spouse, concurred that Greg, at age three, was just developing a little nervous habit akin to the nail biting or hair twirling of his sister.

But as Val complained, my mind flickered to my own head. It’d been sort of itchy too, but I thought I was just getting used to winter’s dry air and wearing hats again. I put Val face down on my lap, parted her hair with my fingers and examined her scalp.

Tiny brown bugs were rushing to hide in the dark recesses of my daughter’s shiny, clean hair. With a rush of dread and determination, I extracted one of the sesame-seed-sized buggers and dashed downstairs where Mark was placidly washing the dishes.

“We’ve got lice!” I shouted, showing him the evidence, a tiny, dark, now motionless dot on my finger.

“Are you sure that’s what it is?” he asked. Then he shrugged and returned to his scrubbing. Denial and minimization have always been his strong suits. But I knew. I knew it was lice. Final answer.

I raced to the computer, Googled “lice” and acquired a quick education. Lice, although harmless, are tough to get rid of. Persistence is the key. They are not partial to poor heads, rich heads, dirty heads, or spotless heads. Lice exist in three stages, and all must be eradicated.

Standard, over-the-counter, chemical treatments as well as natural remedies exist; many make claims which, as we launched our all-out effort to get rid of lice, I found to be less than honest. Treatment might kill off the full grown louses and new born nymphs. (Funny, I always thought of a nymph as a beautiful maiden; not a wiggling insect ready to suck blood.) The nits, egg sacks attached to hair follicles at the scalp, however, are usually impervious to the prescribed insecticide and must be methodically combed or pulled out.

In short, our science-savvy world has not found an easy solution to the problem of head lice. Like Mark said, “We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t find a cure for lice.” I’m thinking that a man on the moon with a head full of bloodsucking critters might get the ball rolling on a cure.

I quickly summarized that lice have no good reason for existence whatsoever other than to drive people crazy with itching and to propel mothers of the world into near hysterical actions to get rid of them. Which is what I proceeded to do.

That was dozens of loads of laundry ago, washing bedding and clothing in hot, soapy water, then drying it completely and scorchingly dry.

That was several trips to the pharmacy ago, to buy over-the-counter treatments and the best  lice comb.

That was a dozen phone calls ago, to warn friends and others with whom we’d come in contact recently.

That was one “mayonnaise-all-over-the-head treatment” (guaranteed to suffocate the buggers) ago.

That was countless hours of parting, sectioning, and combing out live lice and nits, ago.

That was almost eight weeks ago.

But I was wrong about the meaningless existence of lice. Lice do more than merely promoting panic or chronic itching.

“Well, we are going to get to know each other very well,” I remember saying when we were first massaging the chemicals into our scalps, when we could choose to either laugh or cry that our lives were abruptly upended by this miniscule, harmless little bug that strikes fear in the eyes of even the most calm parent. (Which by the way, I’m not!)

All that’s been true and, yes, it’s been a gift. Forced to slow down, we spent more than the usual amount of time together. Every night, we combed hair. We nitpicked. And I learned new things about my family and myself.

Valerie, I discovered, as she sat at my feet reading the magical mystery of Harry Potter aloud while being combed, is a good little reader. And more, she’s a good little philosopher, with thoughtful comments and questions about good and evil, about life, about recognizing things that are true in fiction. Toward the end of our ordeal, Val started to ask for “combing time,” so she could sit and read to me.

Greg resolutely refused to be combed unless given a snack to munch on. Although he seemed oblivious to what was going on, he understood a lot more than we gave him credit for.

“I have bugs in my hair,” he quipped with a little grin to an elderly woman who took the time to say hello to him at the supermarket. She briskly moved her cart down aisle; I hope she was hard of hearing.

I learned that my laid-back and calm spouse could readily spring to action and ably help with the extra chores of laundry, vacuuming, and combing. And that although he is impervious to much upset, his scalp is sensitive. He really, really hated to have the tangles in his hair pulled.

And I unearthed my own prejudice. While intellectually I knew that lice, like rain, can “fall on the just and the unjust,” deep down I was embarrassed our family contracted lice. And a part of me persisted in believing, on a deeply rooted level, that they were bestowed on us by someone poor, or with less than stellar hygiene.

The focus of our lives narrowed during the season of lice. While I can’t say I’m sad they are gone, I do look back on that period fondly. For in addition to discovering new things about myself and my family, I also learned a bit more about living in, accepting and embracing the present moment, whatever it hands me.

Charlotte Joko Beck, in Everyday Zen, writes “[T]he joy of our life is just in totally doing and just bearing what must be borne, in just doing what has to be done” (HarperOne, 2007, p. 68). For us that translated into combing and pulling, into nitpicking. If you didn’t get each nit off before they hatched, newborn nymphs would grow into egg-laying lice and the cycle would repeat itself. Which it did, at first, because, well, I mentally wandered off to make a grocery list or dream about comb-free evenings.

Until now I thought a nitpicker was someone too focused on detail, someone who values method and technique over people, pure fact and logic over feeling and intuition. Like one of my writing instructors, who went over every assignment with, ahem, a fine-tuned comb, picking out even questionable errors but also all the passion and joy with which I’d written.

I used the term for people who magnify the minute because they are not mature enough to handle the broader, more complex picture. Although this may capture some essence of the word, nitpicking has taken on a whole new meaning. It no longer just means “minute and unjustified criticism” according to the dictionary. Nitpicking also conveys focused and totally justified living in the present.

I began to develop a real appreciation for those detail-oriented people who will stop at nothing but a perfection they actually believe exists. Because until we stopped at nothing less than zero bugs and nits, we were doomed. And it was only as we slowed down and nitpicked and combed with utmost concentration, as we learned to submit to the tedious, time consuming task of attending to each strand of hair, that we started to turn the corner on getting the critters out of our heads and home.

That’s the gift I need over and over again. The tasks of work and household, ornery kids, troublesome relationships, stubborn problems, crises, and the complexities of life all exist in the present, and they always will. Only as I turn to what’s in this moment, accept it, and attend to it can I see what is precious, even holy in daily life.

Maybe nitpicking is even a twenty-first century equivalent to biblical foot washing; a little wet, a little messy, not that enjoyable, but an essential act of service which has the power to shake up and even transform our modern ideas about what is really important.

I, however, usually spend all my present moments wishing, planning, and preparing for some great future moment, yearning to get out of my present problems. And of course I’m always disappointed. Because, well, wherever I go, there I am!

Lice at least temporarily interrupted that. They forced me attend to what was literally getting under my skin right now. They demanded I live in the present. It’s all any of us have anyway, nits and all.

As the host of “Millionaire” states when the contestant has thirty seconds to ask a friend to help answer a question, “Your time begins now.”

Final answer.

—Brenda Hartman-Souder, Jos, Nigeria, serves as co-representative of MCC Nigeria and as parent of Valerie and Greg, along with spouse Mark.