Day 29: 30 Days of Life in the StepMom Trenches
Life happens. Lice happens. We can choose to laugh at our life or we can choose to become bitter. While laughter is the best medicine, often we can’t laugh at things in the moment. The humor of the situation doesn’t surface until the moment has passed and we have time to reflect. That time of reflection is also a time when we can see the blessings in our circumstances and over look the burdens.
This has never been truer than when our family came down with lice! Or more like when lice rained down on our family. This is the story of how our family became a Close Nit Family! 
It was like any other Friday afternoon, the kids all blew in from the bus and tossed their stacks of papers at me. While we were chatting about the day, I was loosely flipping through six kids’ worth of weekly papers. Spelling tests, math quizzes, an art project and the very common medical alert forms. One was for strep throat and the other was for lice. Our school sends a note home whenever there is a communicable disease in the class. Just like the lice notes before, I thought this will never happen to us. I had the untrue assumption that lice only happened in dirty hair. Oh on the contrary, those pesky lice bugs love clean hair. Making my children shower daily was coming back to bite me. Literally. Lice bites.
Saturday rolled around and one of the kids was complaining of an itchy scalp. I gave her Head & Shoulders shampoo. Sunday, another child said her head felt itchy and my original “itcher” said the shampoo didn’t work. That’s when I remembered the note. I went to it. Then I went to the computer and googled lice. There I saw those little buggers and read how easy it is to spread, how much they love clean hair and what you have to put your home through when it invades.
I called one of the kids into the kitchen and looked closely at her hair without her “noticing.” That’s when I saw one and that’s when I ran outside telling my husband we have lice and I have to run to Drug Mart. I hopped in my car and seventy dollars later I had every lice shampoo, spray and comb they sold. My usual fear of buying “embarrassing” products vanished next to the thoughts of my children and home invaded.
I came home and checked one of my daughters. She had lice. My husband and I decided to check all the kids. One by one they each had it. Six kids with a head full of lice. The lice was so matted in one of our kid’s hair at the nape of their neck that I had to cut some hair off. I promised through tears that I would take them for a hair cut on Monday. Needless to say, I was having a “bad mom” moment but with all that was going on I didn’t have much time to blame myself.
Then my husband checked my hair and yes those damn bugs hadn’t gotten the memo. They had got me too! I was horrified. My loving husband sat for an hour with me, combing my long hair and helping me shampoo and treat. That’s true love.
We spent the entire night, combing through hair, shampooing, treating each child. I donated my beloved chopsticks to science as they worked wonders sectioning off the hair and looking strand by strand. We bagged up all the bedding. We sprayed all the mattresses. We laid clean blankets on the floor and made pillows out of towels. As my one son put “mom, you are making us live like hobos.”
The next morning, I was home with six kids with lice and my husband ran out to get me lots and lots of quarters. We trekked up to the local laundromat and spent over four hours washing every blanket, sheet, pillowcase, comforter, clothes in the house. We could never have done the volume of wash at home in a reasonable amount of time. We also had to wash all the stuffed animals. With four girls in our home, you can only guess how many stuffies went through the wash and how many came out not looking so great. More tears.
After everything was washed and dried, we bagged it all up and put it in the trunk and drove off to get haircuts. That’s when I learned that hairdressers cannot cut hair with lice. “But you promised mom that you would get my hair cut fixed,” said my daughter. I truly don’t’ know how it happened but the woman agreed to cut my teary eyed daughter’s hair after I told her how many times I treated her hair.
I was thankful.
Day after day, we would comb through the hair, shampoo, treat and day after day we would still find the lice. When I thought they were clean I would take them to school the next day and before they could go in they had to be checked by the nurse. The boys were good after one day and homemade buzz cuts but the girls were rejected over and over. It took four days for two of the girls to be clear and one week for the other two.
I was physically and emotionally exhausted from de-licing my kids and my home.
But something beautiful came out of the experience. We became a closer-knit family because of the nits. Kids worked together to change bedding every night. They pitched in willingly with household chores as my husband and I spent hours each night on the kids’ hair. They shared their experience and had empathy and compassion for each other. My husband and I worked side by side helping the kids. It didn’t matter whether it was one of our biological kids or our stepchild, we cared for them and treated their lice problem. The kids saw us work together. They witnessed the love and compassion we gave to each child, regardless of their birth parents. Our family saw no “steps” that week. We were each a blessing to all the kids and all the kids were a blessing to us. That is something all parents involved can be thankful for.
Lice is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It is awful. It is invasive. It turns your home upside down.And while I never want it again. Ever. I wouldn’t trade the experience for the gift it brought to our family. Yes, I can say this now that it’s over. And No, I wouldn’t have been able to utter those words two years ago while we were in the midst of it.
Lessons from the StepMom Trenches: something good can come out of something hard and challenging. It is difficult to see it in the moment but if you look, it is there.
Challenge: think to a challenging time in your life where you were able to see the blessings after the burden had past. What lessons did you learn? Would you trade the experience? Do you believe you are a stronger person because of what you went through? Keep this situation tucked in your heart and the next time you face challenges, remember the blessings that can come out of burdens.
May I also suggest picking up a bottle of Lice Shampoo just in case. I pray you never, ever have to use it!
