Born Whole

“Look, look, we have moths!” my husband called out, waving a pair of socks with clearly visible holes in front of me.

“We don’t have moths,” I answered, tired of hearing my husband repeat this fantasy claim again and again. “If we did, how come they don’t eat my clothes, only yours?”

Some weeks later, however, I discovered a hole in one of my socks and my husband was triumphant,

“Ha-ha, I told you we have moths!”

“No, my socks are just worn out, that’s all” I protested.

But eventually, the evidence of moths in the house became so overwhelming that I had to admit we had a problem, even though for some unknown reason, the little creatures were attracted almost exclusively to my husband’s clothes.

At first, I was confident the problem would go away if we simply invested in some mothballs, but then the children started moaning about moths flying around in their bedrooms.

It was obvious by now that no amount of cedar wood balls or lavender sachets was going to fix the problem, so my husband phoned a pest control company for advice. A few days later a man showed up at our door, ready to spray our home with some hideously poisonous chemicals, which, he promised, would kill off the moths.

That was last Sunday, and so far, we’ve not seen a single moth in the house. Touch wood.

On Tuesday evening, my 7-year old complained that her head was itching, but I put it down to dry scalp and told her it would get better as long as she didn’t scratch.

By Wednesday afternoon she was scratching her head ferociously, and I said,

“It’s probably just dandruff,” having spotted a few white flakes in her hair.

But then her older sister also began to complain of an itchy scalp, and my husband said the unsayable – the one thing I had been in denial about ever since the itching began:

“Could it be nits?”

“No, it’s just dandruff” I insisted, and to prove it I brought out a nit comb to show him.

But it wasn’t dandruff, of course, it was nits – lots of them.

It took several hours to complete the nit treatment for the girls, and it was a gruelling and painful process.

They both have very long, thick, curly hair that a nit comb can barely get through and each time I thought I’d removed the last nit, I found another and yet another.

It was almost midnight before the girls collapsed in bed exhausted, but hopefully nit free.

Now my scalp has started to itch. But it’s probably just dandruff.