He said again, “Mom, go out there. Shut the door.” And I said, “Milo, are you going to watch TV?” And he tucked his chin and looked up at me through overgrown blond bangs and said, “You go out there.” “Milo, we’re not going to watch TV right now.” Then, defiantly, he turned on the TV, I turned it off, and the whole exchange just fell apart hysterically.

I was torn between feeling thankful that he hadn’t been able to lie and thinking, “Dude, be less obvious and you could maybe get away with it.”

Me: Yo, Milo.

Milo: You like my hair?

Me: Yeah, I like it.

Milo: I moved it [dashingly brushes hair off forehead]. You like that?

Me: I do.

Milo: Thank you.

Lu: How is it hurting your ears?

Me: It is causing me physical pain in my ears to hear the sound your voice is making.

Lu: NOOO. That is psychological, not physical.

This after a Sunday of no less than seven (7) pairs of drawers. I’d hear him across the house yelling, “I GO PEEPEE!” and sprint…only to arrive to a warm puddle and a wry smile: “I peepee.” Indeed. I need a laundress.

Lucy is eight years old! I started this post with maudlin and graphic recollections about what I was doing at this very moment eight years ago, but I decided instead to write about Lu. We think a lot as parents about our role in helping our children become good people, and with this in mind, I surveyed my child:

Lu is a highly relational creature. A billboard we drive by, a story on NPR, something they’re reading in language arts, weather reports, overheard conversations between adults: she is always trying to relate the information to experiences in her own life. Making connections is her most persistent narrative.

When Lu says something, she will repeat it until you have responded in some way (and nodding your head doesn’t count). She wants to be heard.

She argues and negotiates constantly. Jason has banned the word “wait” from our family vocabulary and if he could ban “but,” I think he would. This kid is ready for the Supreme Court.

She empathetic and kind and melodramatic and impulsive. She is both flamboyant and nuanced in her communication. She reads social cues well. She cares about other people, but she wants to (and likely will) have her own way.

Her curiosity is exhausting (to her and to us). Her creativity is boundless (ask to see the wallet she made out of duct tape).

She is an optimist with a consistent capacity to forgive. She can be in a wailing heap on her bedroom floor over some injustice of the mother regime one minute, then saying “Mom, can we start over?” the next.

Knowing how much I admire and love the person Lu already is, I am forced to reconsider my job as a parent: maybe I’m not supposed to help her become anything, but to keep safe all these great qualities so she can be, into adulthood, all that she already is.

And I said, “Go ride some more, kid. I am enjoying watching you, and I’m almost done.”

She rode manic circles, still waving with every round. And after two minutes, I got out of the car and paced around the driveway as she rode, still on the phone. During one pass, she intercepted a shred of conversation: the word “hash.” As in “hashtag,” as in Twitter strategy, as in let’s talk social media, as in my job — and she said “HASHBROWN??!!!” and started cracking up and rode her bike around saying “hashbrownhashbrownhashbrown.” At which point I had to get off the phone because everything I was talking about was instantly less interesting than breakfast potatoes.

And this new method did work — Lice Ice is this minty, all-natural gel that coats the hair and suffocates the bugs and eggs. Milo enjoyed his menthol mohawk. Lu howled for about 6 of the 9 hours she wore the Lice Ice, offended by the smell, the stiffness and how bad her hair looked. Not that it mattered what she looked like: no one invited the people of the Louse House anywhere on Saturday.

When I washed their hair and combed it out Sunday (Milo sat patiently, as long as I gave him an M&M every 45 seconds), I was confident we’d beaten the bugs.

Until I took Milo back to school Monday. After I casually mentioned to the school director that he’d HAD lice, she marched him up to her office to inspect his head. And found a few nits. Ejected.

That’s when I called the Texas Lice Squad, this group of hair hygienists who wear scrubs and magnifying masks and pick the bugs out or your money back. They checked all three of us, found nothing on me, one possible nit on Lu and a handful on Milo. “Pretty clean,” they said admiringly, but treated us anyway and charged us $168. Worth every penny and then some. I don’t clean my own toilets or my own teeth — why could I be trusted to get these heads clean? Lesson 2: with this and so many other tasks in my life, I should really just hire the experts.

Then when I was volunteering in her Spanish class Friday morning, I watched her sit and scratch. And scratch and scratch her head. If she had been a dog, she’d have lifted her hind leg up there to scratch it. My own head began to itch as I helped make the Mexican hot chocolate. I shuddered, realizing we might have a problem.

After I left Spanish, I returned to my work and…forgot. The deeply skeezed out part of my psyche was overtaken by the busy Pollyanna part (this is the same coping mechanism that allows me to spend so much time in hotels without pondering the existence of bedbugs). Lice shmice, my brain said.

But this morning on the couch, cuddled up with my darling children watching “Curious George,” Lu lay her head in my lap. So sweet, until I noticed this rash blooming from around her ears and neck. I shuddered. My scalp began to itch. I got Internet and a flashlight. One look confirmed the lousy truth. For those of you who don’t know (and I hope you never do), lice are harmless. But they are really fucking gross. Bugs on your head? Yes, actual bugs. Crawling. On your head.

The first thing I did — after making Lu get off the couch and away from us and all fabric surfaces — was to send an email to the people Lu may have infected in the past two days. This seemed like the mommy version of calling recent *ahem* partners to tell them you’d been diagnosed with a harmless but gross STD.

Then, I went to CVS to get some lice treatment (The shame! I swear the checkout dude scratched his head after he put the box in the plastic bag.) Then, we shampooed and doused and poisoned. Then, like ma and pa gorillas, we picked the bugs from Lu’s head. This was an hours-long process.

Good news: none of the rest of us seems to have it (despite a desperate case of psychosomatic lice for yours truly). More good news: she was a trooper, and we had a fun day rewarding all her cooperation with the nit-picking. Bad news: if for some reason this treatment fails, the next remedy has us slathering her head in mayonnaise under a shower cap overnight. Gross as that sounds, it’s better than bugs on your head.

Me: “Milo, no jumping on the couch.”
Milo: “I not jumping, I wiggling.” [Wiggles to prove it.]

When you tell him it’s time to do something he doesn’t want to do, whether it’s going to bed or changing his diaper, he holds up one finger and says, “Two minutes.” In fact, his tell when he’s got a poop is that I hear him across the house saying, “Two minutes.”

When he wants an item he’s not supposed to have, he looks up at you from under a veil of blonde bangs and whispers, “Can I have this?” And you let him have it. Because you cannot resist.