parasites

The school nurse found my head lice in the 1st grade. Let me clarify - it was our very collective head lice - it had somehow passed around our classroom faster than did the rumor that Todd D. had piddled his grey sweatpants. My mother was mortified. After all, only dirty hippies and children of women who didn't wear pantyhose got head lice. The bugs clearly had come courtesy of a saucy six-year-old head orge, young brunettes rubbing up against underage towheads in the heat of a blazing London sun. Don't I wish.

She whisked me home on diagnosis night and hosed me down in the tub, dousing my hair with some sterile-smelling dark liquid before putting me to bed for the night. She made sure that I rested my head on one of those towels from the very back of the linen closet. I was told to keep it hush hush, a good call on her part, given the fact that nothing would bring a six-year-old more glee than bragging to an adult dinner party that she had caught real, live bugs IN HER HEAD. We never spoke of my affliction again.

About a week ago, while clearly bored and lacking sufficient Pinot, I was studying the cats' litter box when I noticed something strange. A noodle, perhaps. A perfectly spiraled, two-inch long whirl of spaghetti, wrapped delicately around cat stool like proscuitto on melon. I delicately removed the specimen from its resting place and put it in one of my corner store bags. I of course then promptly returned to watching the Hills while downing a bag of Baked Doritos.

So today when leaving for the vet's office, it struck me that there was a bag of cat feces I'd been storing next to my Queen Anne lingerie chest. Hmmm, I thought. Maybe I should take the offensive stool noodle to the vet? By this time, it had hardened and shriveled up like my soul, so I immersed it in the full bathroom sink to see if I could plump it up. Because of course, Kris, why wouldn't that thing in your cat's feces turn out to be a sea monkey? I ultimately took its crisp self to the vet in a glass votive candleholder taken from the very back of my closet, proudly sealing my creation with clear packing tape. Because that's what Florence Henderson would have done, should she have found an invertebrate in Jan's number 2.

And it occurred to me as Cricket threw up in the vet parking lot that all of the above really made me a mother - a true, loving, neurotic mom. But that unlike my own, who likely quilled it in her journal and then immediately threw the parchment into the fire, I wanted nothing more, when they told me the cats had dirty bird worms, and that I HAD BROUGHT THEM INTO THE HOUSE WHILE OBVIOUSLY NOT WEARING PANTYHOSE, than to abandon Cricket in the car and scream to the Internets that it was so. And I was also happy for the 6,098th time that I wasn't a real-life human mom, given that it probably would have been hard to explain a child locked up in the Sentra.