"I Am So Lucky!!"

There are some days you wake up and look at your kids and immediately think "I am so lucky." But most days you wake up and look at your kids and think "What am I gonna feed these kids for breakfast, where the hell are their gym shoes and how soon can I get them to school?" Monday morning I was thinking pretty much that. Until I opened the newspaper and read a little blurb about Nicole Lynn Holmes of Belle Vernon Pennsylvania. The mother of two was recently arrested and charged with child endangerment, after she sent her two children to school with head lice. My immediate response to this news was, "I am so lucky!"

When I consider some of the things that have happened in our house, especially concerning head lice, its a wonder that I haven’t landed in jail like Nicole.

We have had one bout with head lice thus far. It was this past fall. And I can say with some authority that if there is any experience in parenting ( in addition to potty training) that will almost certainly cause you to develop PTSD, it is dealing with head lice.

The first thing you should know about head lice is that the very second you learn your child has been exposed to head lice and potentially adopted a few of their own, your ability to think rationally is immediately suppressed by a terrible itching that begins on your head and quickly spreads throughout your body. Whatever decisions are made, whatever actions are taken, after the mention of lice, are not those of a rational, responsible adult, they are the desperate moves of a mother trying to wage battle on a tiny army of basically invisible parasites (and the asshole who gave them to your child in the first place).

Coping with head lice is a dirty, dirty business. It will force you to throw every rule you have about bribing your kids out the window. You will do anything to get your kids to sit still and smile (ok not smile, just not scream or bite you) during the hours it takes to check your child’s head for a single nit. You will let your kids watch hours of tv, not just PBS or Noggin but Disney Tween Trash like the "That’s So Suite Life of Hannah Montana" marathon, just so you can comb through their hair in order to confirm your worst fears. You will let your child eat anything they want just so they will agree to allow you to play "beauty shop" for the couple of hours it will take to apply specially formulated poison - the shampoo equivalent of napalm- to your child’s scalp. You will shove candy, any kind of candy, into your child’s mouth just so that you don’t have to listen to them scream "you’re hurting me!" as you yank their individual hair shafts around in hopes of removing any remaining nits.

In short, you will sell your soul to the devil just to get your kids to through the overwhelmingly tedious, unpleasant, downright disgusting task of checking and treating them for lice.

And if you’re too holy to sell your soul to make it through that, you sure as hell will give it all up, just for the hope that one of those critters won’t jump ship and start a colony on your own head.

And all this is assuming you can actually talk your kids into sitting still and letting you even look for lice. If that’s not an option, you will resort to physical intimidation or violence or smothering your child just to make them hold still long enough for you to get a peak at their scalp in good light.

And just to add insult to injury, you will have to force your kids to march to their rooms and round up all the animals, or babies, or blankets that they have come to depend on and hand them over to you so you can lock them up in airtight containers for two weeks. If that’s not the Sophie’s Choice of childhood, I don’t know what is.

After a while, you will be exhausted by your battle with head lice. And because, unless you have eyes with super microscope-like powers that can somehow identify tiny dots for the little crustaceans that they are, at some point you will have to quit your battle against the lice and with a hope and a prayer that they really are gone, send your kids back to school and hope they know enough to not declare - "I stayed home yesterday because I got the lice!" over lunch.

So it’s not that hard for me to see how a mother like Nicole Holmes, could end up doing a simple little thing, like sending her kids back to school with a few live ones running around on their tiny heads. And it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that she is not the first mother to have done something like that.

Its just unfortunate for Nicole that social services was already on the look out for any missteps with her kids. It turns out that the county had already been to Nicole’s house, when a neighbor who visited Nicole uninvited, complained that she found Nicole "passed out while her unkempt children roamed the house."

And when I read that I found that I can consider myself double lucky- because not only have I never never been singled out by the law for my children's dalliances with head lice, but I’m not friendly enough with any of my neighbors to worry about them dropping by while I’m "napping."