“So how much do you want cut off him today?” the hairdresser asked me.
Riley was seated between us, his hands lost beneath the black plastic cape she’d just wrapped around his neck. He would only stay still for so long.
“I want it all off; get the shavers out. Give him a number four.”
The hairdresser looked at me sideways. “That’s quite a lot.”
“Yes,” I said, averting my gaze. “I – uh – he – uh…”
“Yes?”
“He had nits two weeks ago. I just want to cover all my bases.”
The hairdresser gave a knowing smile – also pleased, I’ve no doubt, to have extracted my pained confession – and proceeded to shave away.
I hadn’t realised how long Riley’s hair had become and as his strawberry locks fell to the floor, my nose started to tickle and constrict the way it does just before I cry. He was transformed before my eyes from a chubby cherub to a rough-and-tumble boy.
******
One week later…
On Friday, I spent the better part of an afternoon in front of the television combing nits out of Keira’s hair. It seems I am unable to break this cycle; ‘cycle’ doesn’t even seem to be an adequate term. More an ‘open house of feeding upon my eldest born’s scalp.’ I’d doused her earlier with an ‘all natural’ product which did nothing but bathe the shits in 100% lavender oil. As I scraped them still wriggling out of her hair I’m sure I could hear them protest, “But hang on, we haven’t had our facials or Hawaiian hot stone massage yet!”
As I pressed their bodies beneath my fingernails, hearing with satisfaction that little ‘pop’ as they went so, I said, “Spa’s over, bastards.”
As luck (I guess you could call it that…) would have it, Beaches was the midday movie playing and at that moment it was Hilary role-playing as the perfect housewife to her husband. As he asks her what she was going to do that day, she replies,
“I’m going to buy a wrench. We don’t have one.”
Distempered as I was, I felt like saying, “Half your bloody luck bitch. Swap you places and you come have these buggers crawl all over you.”
(Then I realised I’d been this snarky before; but hell I’m going to blog it anyway.)
But because I am as emotionally manipulated through the Arts as ever, I was soon sucked into the movie (again) and was weeping by the end. Why?
Because no matter how many times people tell me that nits aren’t “Your fault”, “It happens to everyone”, “It happens to the dirty haired/ clean haired kids” that doesn’t take away the fact that at some level I suspect that it reflects upon my parenting skills (or should that read ‘Skillz’?) and, in turn, I find I am turning up a little lacking.
It’s like an eight legged critter – or dozens of them – trampling all over the imaginative metaphor-maker in my head and it’s sending me round the freaking bend. Because in my rather preoccupied state at the moment, the best my mind can come up with is NITS = CRAPPY MOTHERING.
And for that reason – and that alone, because I am fully aware on the scale of problems in life that this really doesn’t rank – I hummed “Wind Beneath my Wings” to placate my bad mood.
And then Riley woke up from his nap.
Scratching his head.
$^@^@^$ with the whole $$^% *%*%* &#*&# !!!!!
