Nit Picking
Head lice as metaphor.
Last week, I went back to the Poconos for another utterly wonderful (relaxing, productive, well-fed) writing weekend at the Highlights Foundation. I’m working on a big, meaty, intimidating round of revisions, and it’s the kind of work that really benefits from long uninterrupted stretches—not just of writing time, but stewing time. When I’m at Highlights, it’s not only the quiet (and the food) that is so conducive to productivity; it’s the rare opportunity to think about nothing but this one thing until I’m ready to stop. Which really is a luxury, because at home, as anyone who has tried to work/write things with young children around well knows, the work stops when it stops—when the school bus pulls up, when someone needs something, when you hear a crash from downstairs. (Case in point, there’s no school today, and there is a child touching me and saying CAN WE GO NOW as I type this.)
At Highlights, even my sleep is more productive. (Not that sleep needs to be productive. It’s just handy when it is.)
On this particular weekend, I was also assisted in my revision by this unbelievably useful framework I’d just read about in Parker Peevyhouse’s Substack:
Some kind of big creative insight always results from these periods of heightened focus. Without giving away any spoilers for a book that may never be published: last time, Liz McCrocklin asked me, “But does anyone need to die?” (Reader, no one needed to die.) This time, I asked Liz, “But do they need to vote?” (Reader, no vote was necessary.) Both of those realizations changed the book, I think, for the better.
Man, I love the puzzle of figuring out how to tell a story.
If I have learned one thing from my life as a freelancer so far, it is this: the ability to devote longer stretches of time to each project, a week or two in a row, rather than a day or a few hours, makes the time on those projects exponentially more productive. I hadn’t fully realized the cost of task-switching until I made this transition. Or maybe it didn’t cost as much when I was younger—but Mid-40s Me (read: it’s the perimenopause, stupid) needs to do one damn thing at a time.
Anyway. Solid weekend, the kind that makes you feel like you’ve really got this shit (book, parenting, marriage, life, fill in the blank) figured out. Then I came back on Sunday evening and promptly discovered that my children had HEAD LICE.
HEAD LICE, for readers without children in elementary school or who have blocked the memory, are bugs that leave microscopic eggs on your child’s scalp that look EXACTLY LIKE DANDRUFF AND YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO GET RID OF THEM ALL WITHOUT SPECIAL TOOLS, TREMENDOUS PATIENCE, AND GOD ON YOUR SIDE. I had some of the requisite tools, but neither of those other things. By the time I’d plucked a live one off my own head, I called in the pros (or rather, my husband did, after I yelled at him to MAKE THE APPOINTMENT STAT).
That’s how my children and I ended up at a place called Lice Aunties on Monday morning, visiting with Shevon, my new best friend.
Shevon, our Lice Aunty/goddess incarnate, is an aspiring pharmacist who is working on an erotic novel on the side. One thing I love about working up the courage to call myself a writer out loud is that when you do, you inevitably end up hearing about other people’s literary aspirations, too: your Lice Aunty’s erotica; a cop’s secret poetry (true story); your wedding-table-seatmate’s upstairs neighbor in Brooklyn who happens to have written one of your favorite contemporary novels. Everyone has a story, they’re just waiting for an invitation to tell it.
Same, Shevon, same.
Three hours later, I gave Shevon all my money, professed my love for her, and said I hoped to never see her again—except when I walked into her pharmacy one day. Or at her book launch. Anywhere but Lice Aunties. Then we went to a McDonald’s drive-through with our oil-soaked heads in shower caps and called it a day. (I won’t post the selfie we took because one of my children will never forgive me.)
And not that I think every Substack post needs to be tied up with a neat lesson about negotiating the balance between writing and motherhood—about ever daring to think you’ve got anything figured out—but: the universe was pretty obvious with this one.
