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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Slam it, baby!
The women of the WNBA still don't dunk. But do male sportswriters really want to see women dunk so badly, or just dunk badly?
By Julian Rubinstein
[09/02/99]

Ice, ice, baby
Here I am: Cold to the bone, face smeared with mud, herding horses near the Arctic Circle. Call me "Incredulous in Iceland."
By Pippa Gordon
[09/01/99]

Single female seeks travel and romance -- with child
A vacation resort for single moms and dads.
By Joan Oleck
[08/31/99]

My Mother, the disaster
When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, of course I came out to help. But I didn't expect her to seduce the doctor.
By Laurel Touby
[08/30/99]

Harvard and heroin
I coasted to an Ivy League degree as a drug addict, but forever damaged the bond between mother and son.
By Seth Mnookin
[08/27/99]

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It seems a little baffling, now, doesn't it? These days, after all, lice are a tedious fact of our lives as parents, like the chicken pox or a stomach bug making the rounds at day care. We greet news of a new outbreak with groans and curses, but certainly without recriminations, because our kids are all going to get it, right? From school or camp, from the headrest on those culturally enriching flights to Paris, from the children of famous writers or captains of industry. The package of Nix sits in our medicine cabinets, right between the children's Tylenol and the Ipecac, just waiting for its moment. I was absolutely prepared for it to happen to me, but when it did, it happened in a way that knocked me flat. Here, then, is my pleasant little story about lice -- with a twist.

My daughter was young, nearly a year old, and on an utterly normal suburban summer day, I was driving her home from an exercise class at my local YWCA when I felt the first tickle on my scalp. The dreaded word popped into my head: lice.

When I got home, I put my daughter in her crib and went to the bathroom. Parting my hair, I saw a tiny black dot moving over my scalp, then another. Then I felt a tickle on my arm. Another one on my leg. These lice were colonizing my limbs. I hurriedly checked my daughter, but she seemed to be fine. I considered this something of a victory.

Because it was me, not her, I thought I'd better get a doctor's opinion. Sitting in her examining room a few hours later, I pointed out a tiny black dot moving leisurely across a patch of exposed knee through a hole in my jeans. She snatched it between glass slides and went into the next room, where I was soon invited to examine an absolutely vicious looking insect through a microscope. My doctor laughed. I had already been in that summer for a nasty reaction to a bee sting and for a Lyme tick bite.

"You don't need a doctor," my doctor said. "You need an entomologist." I was sent home with instructions to follow the instructions on the Nix package, and I stoically did so: shampoo, then an hour of combing my long black hair on the back porch. I felt rather smug that I had handled things so well. By late that afternoon, I was on the phone to my father, bragging about how responsible I'd been, how competent, how efficient. My first case of lice, dispatched with alacrity! I'd certainly showed those little bastards who was boss.

I noticed, as I said this, a tiny black dot crawling up my leg. Impossible. It was impossible. I'd followed the directions exactly. I'd combed and combed. I'd stood in a scalding shower making sure every millimeter of skin was washed clear of little black dots. How could this be happening?

I called my doctor. Sometimes you need to do it twice, she said.

I did it twice. I scrubbed and combed, and for the next three days, those little black dots continued to crawl over my scalp and body. I ceased to live a normal life. I sat for hours, obsessively examining my skin, ignoring my daughter except to ascertain yet again that she was little-black-dot-free. I endured carcinogenic levels of Nix as I did the treatment a third time. They wouldn't stop crawling over my body. I began to fixate on the word "infested." I was infested. But what was the source of the infestation? Was it inside me? Were they crawling out of an orifice? Or some heretofore undetected interruption in my skin? I did not know how, or if, I could ever enter the world again. How could I go out in public with insects crawling all over me, as if I were a piece of food left rotting in the sun? Was this the first stage of a process of complete decay? Ashes to ashes? Dust to dust?

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