Mrs Rosenfeld had just finished cleaning her kitchen for Passover when we arrived at 4 o’clock. The cupboards and drawers were empty and the countertops were bare. She was in the process of sending her two sons aged 2 and 3 outside with a teenage girl and a baby in a stroller. “Go for a long walk,” she instructed the older girl, before turning to me and explaining that the family had been to a wedding the night before and hadn’t gotten home until midnight and the children were cranky.
I brought my daughter to this Orthodox home in Brooklyn to be checked for lice, after obtaining the woman’s phone number from several other mothers on the playground at My Kid’s school. I called her the morning after I got an apologetic phone call from the mother of one of My Kid’s friends who had hosted My Kid for a playdate at her home the previous week. They had been to the lice lady and her daughter had them. After school the previous afternoon, another mother on the playground, who had already been through the lice ordeal with her twins some weeks prior became suspicious of the tiny white dots she noticed in the dark hair of this friend if her daughter who had also had playdates with My Kid.
If this had happened three years ago, I think I would have killed myself. There is no way I could have dealt with lice. Pillows on the couch. Laundry on the floor. My Kid climbing into our bed. Stuffed animals everywhere.
But, I have been listening to the lice stories of the other mothers on playgrounds and in kitchens for over three years. When it finally happened to us, I knew what to do. Call the legendary lice lady of Brooklyn and go get combed out in her kosher kitchen full of children.
I was kind of excited to go in that living-through-a-natural-disaster-where-nobody-gets-hurt way because I had heard so much about this Orthodox mother of 14 who pays her children’s Yeshiva school tuition combing out lice. It’s A BROOKLYN THING like eating cheesecake at Junior’s Restaurant or riding the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, or having a conversation drowned out by the Q train passing over the waterfront playground in Dumbo.
This woman she’s AMAZING!
Mrs. Abigail F. Rosenfeld, Lice Consultant functions a family therapist. That’s what you’re paying for. We paid her almost as much as we paid the lawyer who did our taxes. But, it was worth it. There was an extra charge for the time it took to comb through my daughters butt-length hair which I didn’t mind paying and I bought an extra German-engineered surgical steel lice come out of sheer paranoia.
As Mrs. Rosenfeld combs the child’s hair she calms the parents and teaches them how to do it themselves. People do crazy things, she said. There is no need to cut a child’s hair. She tells parents not to panic or exhaust themselves.
When I first heard of lice I learned that you have to wash anything made of fabric in the house that the child has touched; All the bedding in the house, All the child’s clothes, Shampooing carpets and upholstery, wipe down every inch of everything and all the toys in the house have to be sealed in plastic bags for two months until the lice on them die. This sort of thing can be accomplished by quitting work and staying home to clean 24-hours a day for a solid week or two. I had also heard of killing the lice by covering the child’s head with olive oil or mayonnaise or some other goey disgusting substance and leaving it there for hours. On the internet I saw a video of a woman demonstrating going over a child’s head approximate 20 hairs at a time pulling off nits individually. It’s an impossible standard. And many schools have a no nit policy which means children can miss weeks of school while their mother struggles to figure out how to get rid of them and putting her own job in jeopardy staying home with kids who aren’t even sick.
This is what Abigail Rosenfeld Lice Consultant told me to do:
Wash all the child’s bedding and the bedding of any other bed she has been in or on. Vaucum all the furniture and carpeting. Wash the clothing the child has worn. The school backpack has to go into a plastic bag for two weeks. Stuffed animals go in plastic bags for two weeks. (Much less time than the two months I had in mind) If the animals or dolls is very special it can sit alone on a high shelf out of reach for two weeks. (and not suffocate in the plastic bag of stuffed animal jail as My Kid calls it.) If they hang together all the family’s coats need to be washed or dry cleaned but as the dry cleaning bills and exhaustion increase–if you can’t deal with it, just put it in a plastic bag for two weeks.
The combing out process itself is simple and takes place in her kitchen where she is the calm eye in the center of the storm as her own children run in and out with homework questions and requests for money to go to the corner store for ice cream or crispy snacks. As she works she speaks on the phone which rings frequently, talks to the parents of the child she combs and guides her children with words.
A boy of about six decides he doesn’t want the tuna bagel he just brought in from the corner store. She instructs him to put it into the refrigerator. Ten minutes later when the preschool boys arrive after their walk she tells someone else to get the bagel and divide it between the little ones.
“Give him some of your tuna bagel”
“It’s a mitzvah to share with your brother.”
“Could you get the toy of that top shelf for them.”
“Would you mind holding the baby.”
“Please take the laundry downstairs.”
First she puts Pantene conditioner on the child’s dry hair. (Pantene brand conditioner was not created to remove lice, but it is the right consistency to immobilize the bugs and it’s easy to see the tiny insects and nits against the product’s bright white color) She combs through the hair looking for lice. She wipes the conditioner off the comb onto a white tissue looking for lice which she then shows to the parents and children so they will know what to look for in the future. Second, she sprinkles some baking soda on top of the creme rinse and combs it out again, this time to get the nits, or lice eggs which I was also taught to identify. The baking soda acts as an abrasive and scrapes the nits off the hair shaft.
Her little children want juice and attention.
Her bigger children want homework help and cash for the corner store.
Because the kitchen was clean and bare while we were there, she was constantly handing out dollars to different children who went to the corner store for their after school snacks and collecting the change from them when they returned. One little boy came in with salty chips she didn’t like him to eat, but she let it slide after she made him share most of them with his brothers. When the tired two-year old started mouthing off she let it slide saying, “He’s a real boy.” The experienced mother of 14, recognized the futility of disciplining a tired and hungry two year old.
There are other older children, but I did not see them. Perhaps they choose not to pop into the kitchen while their mother was combing the lice out of some yet another strangers hair.
She told me one of her daughters prefers to use the fine-toothed metal comb for daily hair care. Gee I wonder why.
When her husband arrives home at the end of the work day, he moves about the house with a stethescope around his neck, as he continues to see patients in another room.
Mrs. Rosenfeld hadn’t yet started dinner when a family arrived from Manhattan, late for their 6:00 pm appointment. (In a Volvo, from Dalton, the Upper East Side school Mariel Hemingway’s character attended in the Woody Allen movie “Manhattan”)
I wondered if the Rosenfelds were able to keep up this pace because as Orthodox Jews they know that every Friday they will have to (or get to) turn everything off and stop working completely.
Putting things in plastic bags for two weeks. How similar to the preparation for Passover when all the bread must be removed from the house and countertops and other things are covered with plastic for the 8 days of passover.
As of the last day of school before spring break, 9 children in my daughter’s 3rd Grade class had been identified with lice.
Oh and by the way, the Third Plague in the story of Moses in the Book of Exodus: LICE
