There are some days when I just feel like hiking to the top of a mountain, taking off all of my gear, chucking it over the ledge, and yelling “FORK!” as loud as I can. Today is that day. Except instead of a mountain top, I’m standing in the middle of my kitchen surrounded by my kids, which is why I have to yell “fork.” Little ears record everything I say and play the transcripts back too accurately at the most appropriate times.

And then one day you’re driving through a tunnel and your preschooler is yelling “Fuck” out of the window with total reckless abandon, and you just feel thankful that the tunnel is so dark that no one sees your shoulders shaking with shocked and silent laughter. So today I want to yell and wave my white dish towel because I give the fork up.

I have a 2,000-page research paper due tomorrow evening, a three-hour class tonight, and three people who woke up with little bugs crawling around in their hair and making life irritatingly itchy. One of those three people is me. And those bugs? You may have guessed it: Lice.

I know lice infestations are not the end of the world, nor are research papers of which you have 3oo words written and about ten pages of notes. But when you put those two together, for a semi-dramatic person such as myself, it sure does feel like it. Instead of sending my 1^st-grader off to school with my husband at 7:30 this morning, I sent my husband off to the pharmacy for lice treatment and reigned in that “good mom” ego while I called my kids’ schools to explain why they would be absent that day.

TO my great shock, they did not ostracize me from the community but rather responded with sort of a sympathetic shoulder shrug. I guess it wasn’t the first time a parent called in with a report of lice. What?!

Armed with head scarves, lice treatment, old towels, plastic gloves and fine-toothed combs, we retreated to the back patio and attacked those creepy “vampire bugs” (As we described them to our boys until one pointed out that we should be morphing into lice since being bitten but not killed by said lice, so then we had to go back to calling them boring old lice again. Foiled by vampire logic).

Inch by inch, we combed out nits=eggs and a few woozy survivors of our chemical attack. We drowned those in a bucket of water with the rest of their unhatched babies. We are heartless went it comes to parasitic battle. I have no regrets.

Four days later, I am happy to say that there is little evidence left of the head lice debacle. Nightly head checks are now included with story time. After a (fairly normal) sleep-deprived night, I handed in my research paper with mediocre confidence. Exhale. I think the biggest lesson here is: head lice sucks.

Or maybe that I shouldn’t procrastinate quite so much. Or that maybe I need to loosen the reigns a bit on my determination to never let my stuff overlap with my kids’ life. I’m a student and a mom. There are moms that work and parent. Life is not perfect, and I am doing the best that I can.

Though I hope to never have to spend hours combing through fine, slippery locks looking for little shiny eggs plastered to hair shafts, reality is that I have kids who don’t live in a bubble. Next time, instead of being overwhelmed with the thought of how many bugs are crawling around (or life) and how I could possibly catch them all, I will simply take one section at a time and annihilate the fork out of those little bastards.