My Inner Child Needs a Nit Comb

Tenderness, lice, and letting someone comb through your bullshit.

The day before we leave for a long road trip, my partner’s plane is delayed five hours, I’m fighting off a cold, and my son comes home from camp with lice. It feels like the perfect finale to an already long week of solo parenting, work, and trying to get us vacation-ready.

My first reaction is anger. Why now? Then anxiety. What do I do? Then, finally, determination: I’m going to annihilate these bugs even if it takes all night.

So there we are, sitting in the bathroom, his head bowed while I comb through his hair. One, two, three squished between my fingers. Four, five flushed down the toilet. It’s steady work, scanning and picking, quick before they dart beneath a clump of hair.

His beautiful hair.

I almost forget he’s dealing with it, too—the weird, itchy sensation, the bugs running across his scalp. I pause my digging and look at him:

“You know this isn’t your fault, right? This just… happens. We’ll figure it out together.”

It’s a gentle thing to say to your children. It’s even more so when we remember to say this to ourselves.

He nods and lets out a sigh. “Did you get them all yet?”

I don’t have the heart to tell him how many eggs I still see.

So I douse his head in olive oil, this strange kind of anointing, and wrap his head in plastic, which is apparently the best way to suffocate what’s still alive.

It was unpleasant, yes—watching them move across his scalp like that, that infested feeling. And of course, I start to itch too, not from infestation, but imagination. Phantom bugs. The kind your nervous system invents once it’s been on alert too long.

Tomorrow, we’ll worry about the nits.

Monkeys do this for each other — pick bugs, flick off dirt, stroke fur back into place, but it’s not all about hygiene. In macaque troops, grooming can take up 20% of the day. Studies show that this kind of grooming lowers their heart rate. It calms their nervous systems.

It’s a ritual, really. A way of saying: You’re safe with me. I’ll help you sort it out.

Once he’s asleep, I cry a little. It always seems to happen when my partner’s away — a broken appliance, a sick dog, a head full of lice. But honestly, the sorting never ends. The mess is daily. What saves us is having someone else who can help us through it.

And sometimes, when no one else is around, that someone has to be me.

That’s when I hear her, my inner child, whispering from the back of the room:

Can you sit with me, too?