B-Rant

- submitted by G. Babakian on 06/23/2008

  

How I Discovered the (Creepy, Crawly) Limits of Liberal Tolerance

Genine Babakian

During our first spring in the suburbs - the spring before my husband had figured out how to use the lawnmower - we came home one day to find a bright yellow warning on our front door. Mow your lawn, it said, or face the consequences - the consequences being a fat fine.

In no time, my husband got that lawnmower working.

It was not the threat from the village lawn police that motivated us. It was the shame. The realization that our neighbors may be looking our way - assuming they could still see us through the tall grass - and thinking: At last! Would someone please teach those city transplants the rules of suburban living?

We could have used a rule book that year. More than once we stepped beyond the boundaries of acceptable suburban behavior - like the time my husband built an open fire on our gravel driveway so that the children could roast marshmallows.

But my neighbors are a tolerant lot. Tolerance, in fact, is a virtue of our town, and one of the reasons we chose it. Unlike the homogeneous suburb where I grew up, it is a place that has attracted interracial families and same sex couples, where a woman can sport a new pedicure as easily as she can breastfeed a toddler in public.

We found it to be an open door, anything goes kind of place. Until the head lice.

Head lice can shut those open doors pretty quickly.

My daughter was the first to bring them home from school, scratching her little head relentlessly. But being an inexperienced head lice hunter, it took me a few weeks to realize that the itching was caused by creatures the size of a pinhead crawling all over her scalp. By that time we were on vacation, and the unwelcome guests had spread to the whole family, including my other two children, my in-laws and, yes, to me.

Our return home from that trip was slightly less welcoming. Not realizing this was one of those subjects you keep to yourself, we mentioned our vacation head lice adventure to friends and neighbors. My daughter even included it in her holiday journal. Some were quick to say we had to stay outside. Others worried days in advance about my son's head touching the communal batting helmet at the last Little League game of the season. "I may never go to your house again," one person told me before adding an unconvincing, "Just kidding."

We were the pariahs of the neighborhood. Under the cover of anonymity I slipped out of town - where I was less likely to run into people I knew - to buy lice combs, lice shampoo, lice gel, lice spray. We gathered together behind closed curtains for our daily dose of delousing.

Fortunately, our exile did not last long. Now nit-free, we could hold our heads up as we walked to school, the supermarket, the ice-cream store. We could invite people back to our home without fear of contaminating them.

Lice were the furthest thing from my mind -- until one spring day when my daughter's Girl Scout Troop celebrated its last meeting of the year at our house. As the screen door was opening and closing with girls running in and out, one of the troop leaders mentioned the latest case of head lice that had just been reported in her daughter's class.

My reaction? "Everyone outside," I said, ushering all the girls out of the house while trying to calculate how many heads had touched the furniture. "It's time for ice-cream!"

Genine Babakian, a writer and editor, is a recent transplant to suburban New Jersey....read more rants