Our first encounter came when my daughters were in second and fourth grades at Sunflower School. It was about 8:00 p.m. one night when I somehow spotted a translucent gray bug creeping along Olivia’s dirty blond scalp. I turned to check Charlotte and there was a convoy of three bugs trucking across the part of her straight, shiny black hair.
In a panic I called Tinuviel, the parent of a Sunflower classmate, who had a last name but nobody knew it because when you are named after one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s elves you don’t really need a last name. As a professional hairstylist with great knowledge of how to get rid of lice, she had become the most powerful woman at school, making $50 an hour to go through our children’s hair with thin wooden barbecue skewers picking out lice and their eggs. The eggs are called nits, thus the phrase. Tinuviel’s fee included her unflappable aura and blatant annoyance at the other parents’ panic.
“They can’t hurt you,” she’d say as she flicked an egg half the size of a grain of rice into a red Solo cup filled with rubbing alcohol.
“But don’t you need to squish that?” I nervously asked.
“What do you think? The lice are going to hatch, swim to the side of the cup, climb up, and chase after you?” she’d laugh while my daughters shot me pleading looks to just be quiet and let the master do her work.
I laugh now, laugh at the fear I once suffered because of those pathetic little bugs. The next year, when Tinuviel and her son were living in Costa Rica, lice struck Sunflower School again. This time it was I who was wielding the barbecue skewers along with Angie, another mom who studied under Tinuviel. We perched ourselves on the picnic table in the school parking lot with students sitting between our knees on the benches. Manipulating their hair with the sticks, we divided it into razor-thin segments and looked closely from root to tip for invaders. We picked each head as clean as we could, but the kids still had to go home and show up to school free of lice the next day to gain admittance. While we didn’t get paid, we felt it was our civic duty, and also our diligence helped protect our own children and homes from infestation.
Like all issues at Sunflower, lice were discussed in the daily morning meeting where students were reminded not to share hats and hairbrushes or to attach any kind of stigma to those who were infested. When a boy was sent home on a Tuesday and came in on Wednesday with a shaved head, the sea of students parted in awe to make way for him. One girl missed a week of school because, even though we picked her clean in the parking lot each morning, the bugs were still living in the little girl’s house and kept reinfesting her hair. All the students made her construction paper cards with “We miss you Molly” and “lice are not nice” scrawled in Crayola. Nobody, students or parents, raised an eyebrow at the red Solo cups brimming with nits floating in rubbing alcohol or the nitpickers lined up on the picnic table next to the school’s entrance, because getting lice was seen as nothing different from catching a cold.
When my daughter Charlotte was transitioning to Lutheran Church of the Cross’s middle school, however, she didn’t feel as comfortable comparing notes and nits with her classmates. Yes, lice of the twenty-first century aren’t just for elementary kids rolling around on Dora the Explorer rugs. Thanks to travel soccer and competitive cheerleading teams, older kids who contract lice from younger siblings pass them along as easily as they share Snapchat stories. Lice have joined pimples and periods as yet another middle school rite of passage.
Though Charlotte wasn’t infested, many of her friends were sent home from school with the critters and a note saying they could return once they used some Rid. (The Lutherans, apparently more trusting than that nondenominational school in Charlotte, required no proof of purchase.)
“Rid doesn’t work unless you do it exactly right and still pick out every nit after you wash the hair,” I bemoaned to Charlotte when she came home reporting that half the girls in her class now had lice. “Somebody needs to check every single head before they come back to school.”
“Mom! Don’t. Please do not go to LCC and pick lice,” Charlotte begged. “This isn’t Sunflower.”
“You’d be a sight more humiliated if LCC’s lice gets on you,” I said.
She had no idea what I meant, but I knew what she meant. Because LCC Day School went from pre-kindergarten to eighth grade, Charlotte coming in at sixth grade was the new girl during the most angst-ridden phase of education. Even the veterans who had been together since they were transitioning from Pull-Ups to Cinderella underwear were now sizing up each other differently.
Charlotte found a group of girls who welcomed her at their lunch table and texted her with homework questions and LOLs. One girl even felt close enough to warn her that the group’s aspiring queen bee complained: “Has anyone noticed how Charlotte used to kind of walk behind us and now she walks beside us?” Though the comment hurt, Charlotte felt camaraderie with the source and could sense she was being accepted by girls who appreciated her quiet ways, easy smile, and smart contributions in class, so I kept barbecue skewers in remission as long as I could.
A week later, however, Charlotte had lice. I told her I was calling the school’s director just to explain what I knew but would not offer to check heads.
“I don’t have many talents, but I do know a little bit about lice. The best way to get rid of them is not with that special shampoo but by picking out the nits,” I told Mrs. Stroud over the phone.
“Thank you so much for calling. Is there any way you can show us exactly what to do?” she asked.
Before I knew it, I was on the patio outside the middle school office with the school secretary and P.E. teacher showing them how to discern a nit from dandruff. I assured my proteges that dropping the lice and nits into a cup of rubbing alcohol would kill them. There was no need to squish the eggs. It’s not like they were going to hatch and crawl up the side of the cup and then chase after them.
We set up a line in the sand that students had to cross before they could return to school and gave them the numbers of the Lice Fairy and other nitpickers for hire. Charlotte was mortified, but after my second day on lice patrol her new friends’ moms started calling.
“I heard you have been helping with the lice. Thank you so much. Is there any chance you could look at my head?” one said to me. “And we just adore Charlotte. Can she go out on the boat with us this weekend?”
“My husband’s head has been itching since this whole thing started. I have no idea what I’m looking for,” another said. “This is so much to ask, but could he stop by your house on his way home from work? And could Charlotte spend the night this weekend?”
I don’t think the newfound social clout with the middle school moms was only because I carried the prestigious title of Lice Mom. Maybe one way to mesh with a new group is to admit you have their same worries and angst.
But you better believe I checked every one of those girls’ heads before they spent one night in our house or Charlotte stayed with them.
12. A Minute on the Lips, Forever on the Hips
Shortly after we got married, my former husband and I went to a party for new members of the church we joined. A guest urged me to try the key lime pie, and I told her I was doing Weight Watchers to shed the pounds I’d gained since the wedding.
“Oh yeah. That’s what happens,” her husband commented. “The bride loses all this weight for the wedding, then as soon as she says, ‘I do,’ it’s like pulling the ripcord on a life raft.”
I should have slapped him, but I was young and in my pre-bitter years. I actually laughed hard enough that I choked a little on my white wine spritzer. (Half as many Weight Watchers points as a glass of wine.)
At five feet, two inches, with a longtime commitment to Dairy Queen’s Oreo-and-Butterfinger Blizzards, I have always been on some kind of diet or at least constantly aware that I shouldn’t have eaten what I just ate. My first crash diet was freshman year in college when a group of us tried to lose ten pounds in five days before Spring Break on the potato diet. We ate a baked
potato for breakfast, one for lunch, and one for dinner. That last one was our splurge because we melted a low-fat orange square that slightly resembled cheese on it. We lost about five pounds and gained it all back with the first slice of pizza.
The next year, I tried SlimFast for a week. “A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and a sensible dinner” sounded easy enough. I quickly grew tired of the vanilla and chocolate shakes, however when I whipped them up in the blender with an Oreo or two the shakes weren’t so bad. I also added Kahlua for a low-fat play on a White Russian. I gained three pounds.
Weight Watchers, which is now Wellness Works, was and still is the program that’s worked best for me for several decades. I’m a card-carrying lifetime member who’s been a devotee through the days of the food scale, the cardboard slide rule era, and now the smart phone app that scans barcodes to calculate points. I’ve signed up and dropped out of Weight Watchers at least ten times in the past thirty years, racking up more than a hundred meetings in strip malls, church basements, and even the conference room at the Tampa Bay Times for the Lose-It-At-Work program.
I was there when vegetables became points-free and a few years later when lean chicken and boiled eggs were declared free as well. After that global shift, a woman at a meeting told Anthony, our hilariously honest group leader, she was worried she would end up eating too many hard-boiled eggs.
“Honey, I don’t think any of us got here from eating too many hard-boiled eggs,” he answered. The best leaders have a sense of humor and a doctorate in psychology. Women share tearful tales of husbands who still insist on chicken-fried steak and deep-dish chocolate pie while red-faced men tell of friends who tease them for declining nachos at the game. Some members talk on and on and on about anything from the chocolate buffet on a cruise to Cancun they took seven years ago to the great deals they get on wine at the Aldi on 34th Street South. They just want to talk. The heroic leaders know how to comfort members who see Weight Watchers as group therapy, yet still keep meetings on track and dole out helpful advice.
After I turned fifty, I gave a couple lackluster tries at Weight Watchers but didn’t really commit to counting points and going to meetings. (Going to meetings is how I ultimately lose the weight.)
One of the twenty-somethings at the public relations firm where I was working was doing this intermittent fasting thing, eating only eight hours a day from noon to 8:00 p.m.
I gave it a try and by 9:15 a.m. the first day I saw a mirage of a baked potato. On the third day, I had to fast anyway for blood-work at the lab. As the technician was drawing my blood at 8:30 a.m. she asked what I was planning to eat as soon as she was done.
“This is ridiculous, but I’m not eating until noon. I’m doing this intermittent fasting thing with my friend at work,” I answered.
“What’s your friend’s name?” she asked.
“Alana,” I said.
“Well, let me tell you something. Alana is crazy. Alana has lost her mind.”
“Well, she says I’ll get used to it.”
“What did I just say? Alana has lost her mind. That girl doesn’t even know what she’s saying.”
“You may be right.”
“I know I’m right. Don’t listen to Alana. That’s no way to live. You and Alana need to stop that nonsense.”
This conversation was my hall pass to give up on intermittent fasting, but six months later, I signed up for something even more out of my league called Faster Way to Fat Loss. It’s based not only on intermittent fasting but also prescribed workouts and a rotation of high-carb days, high-fat days, low-carb days, and low-fat days. My local leader was low pressure and very helpful. She made great food suggestions including using Trader Joe’s rosemary chicken to make chicken salad with mayonnaise for the high fat days. I had not eaten mayonnaise since 1984 because of all the fat, so I was excited to try it again. I checked the nutrition label and learned one cup has ten grams of fat, so I mixed two cups with four chicken breasts to boost my fat intake. I didn’t remember chicken salad being so much like mayonnaise soup but forced it down and waited for the pounds to melt off of me.
I told a friend about the diet and my high-fat chicken salad.
“Katherine, that’s not right. You never put that much mayonnaise in chicken salad unless you’re feeding like thirty people,” she said. We went and checked the nutrition label on the mayonnaise in her refrigerator and found that it’s one tablespoon, not one cup, that has ten grams of fat. A cup of mayonnaise has 160 grams of fat. Two cups, have 320. Gross.
I didn’t give up, however, because I was feeling stronger from the prescribed daily workouts and knew I could figure out the food. On the next high-fat day, by the time I left work I was way behind on my fat intake and had thirty minutes left before I was done eating for the day.
I pulled into Trader Joe’s, bought two avocados, hopped back in my car, peeled them with the aid of a ball point pen and my fingers, and ate each one like an apple. I arrived at a friend’s birthday gathering with avocado caked beneath my fingernails and a racing heart.
“Katherine, this diet is stressing me out, and I’m not even on it,” Biz said, offering me a glass of wine. I broke the Faster Way to Fat Loss rules and had a glass of Chalk Hill past the 8:00 p.m. cutoff.
After another week, I told my Faster Way coach that I loved the prescribed workouts and was finally doing weights instead of just cardio, but the food regimen was too time consuming and stressful for me. She assured me it takes time to get used to it, and I was doing well. She asked if I was watching the Facebook videos that were posted a few times a week and said they would really help me stay on track.
“I just haven’t had time. I thought I’d watch them all this weekend,” I confessed.
“Try watching them in the morning when you are putting on your makeup. Just prop your phone up on your makeup table,” she advised.
“Oh, that’s a good idea,” I lied. I put my makeup on at stoplights.
This was my cue to give up on Faster Way to Fat Loss. As with many things in life, the same approach doesn’t work for everyone. We just do the best we can to be healthy and try not to judge anyone who slips Oreos into their SlimFast.
13. Your Children Always Come First
The pediatrician studied the glob of pus oozing from the patchwork of scabs along my one-year-old son’s left index finger. “It’s definitely infected. And you have no idea when or how it happened?” he asked.
“I could charge you with gross negligence of your third child and subject you to a court of your peers who would most certainly revoke that Mother’s Day card with two little handprints this sweet boy made for you before your failed attempt at motherhood led to the maiming of one of those hands,” he added. Well, he didn’t say those exact words, but that’s pretty much what his look conveyed.
Yet again, my son Wade had been lost in the shuffle of raising three kids under eight, working part-time, trying to make sure everyone had diapers and clean underwear and low-sugar jelly without aspartame and a not-too-scary costume for the Halloween carnival, and that we were home from the dentist in time to meet the exterminator who promised to kill the rat living behind the kitchen wall before Delbert, our basset hound, bit it and caught rabies.
“I guess I didn’t even hear Wade cry when he cut his finger on a knife or pinched it in the pantry door,” I lamented to my father on the phone that night. “Or maybe I did hear him cry and I just handed him a sippy cup and stuck him in front of Curious George without even noticing his finger was bleeding.”
My two older kids got nature walks, music classes, and dictated stories to me that I wrote and they illustrated, I told my dad. Wade just got dragged along for the ride our busy lives demanded.
“Good Lord, Katherine,” he said. “I spent the first six months of my life in a wooden cradle in the kitchen. Your Aunt Zetta tied a string to it and ran it through the window out to the yard so she could play outside and give that string a tug to rock the cradle if I cried,” h
e said. “My mother never read a book to me in my life, much less wrote a story for me, and I was Phi Beta Kappa at Carolina.”
Daddy was the youngest of fifteen children, born to Bird and Ida Victoria Snow on a tobacco farm in western North Carolina. He could always bring life into perspective with childhood stories. His siblings said he was spoiled because he was the only one who got jelly on his biscuit. Christmas morning brought only stockings with oranges and peppermint sticks, but the Snow children were thrilled to insert the candy in the middle of the fruit and use it as a straw for sucking the fruit’s sweet juice. Though the family of eleven boys and four girls lived six hours from the North Carolina coast, the first ocean my dad ever saw was the Pacific, as he crossed it in a troop carrier on his way to the Philippines during World War II.
His family lived comfortably enough until the Great Depression, and then my grandfather lost his store and the price of tobacco plummeted to seven cents a pound. There were never more than eight offspring in the house at one time, since many of the older kids were married with families of their own by the time the younger siblings were born, but my grandmother still had no time to be a doting mother. My father was born when she was forty-four, and his dad was sixty-four, so nobody was reading to him at bedtime or quizzing him on multiplication at the breakfast table. Ida didn’t march into the school to complain when my dad’s second-grade teacher made him wear a dunce hat and sit in the corner after his undiagnosed color blindness caused him to color the grass blue and the sky green. When a note came home saying one of his older brothers talked back to a teacher, she didn’t ask her son for his side of the story. She simply told him to go to the yard and pick a branch off a tree.
Rules for the Southern Rule Breaker Page 6
