In the morning the tops of the trees were pale-pink from a sun I couldn’t see, and it was cool enough I needed a sweater for my walk. It was just me on the road until I got to the lake, and then the same anglers started to appear with their bikes and their buckets. No one sleeps this time of year, there’s no incentive. It’s still light past nine at night, then by five again in the morning. I’ll sometimes get into bed before dark since I go pretty hard during the day. But Dawn reminds me she goes 12, 15 hours sometimes — and on top of that, she picks up most of the kid-responsibilities. I did fix dinner last night and clean up, but it’s small potatoes by comparison.

On Saturday we all got checked for lice, and three out of four of us were infested. Charlotte, with her long blonde hair, was the equivalent of a downtown Vancouver condominium population-wise, but Lily and Dawn just had eggs. They use an oil to agitate your scalp and bring the bugs to the surface, then a wire comb to pull them out. Then, they put the lice on a paper towel so you can see them first-hand. After you get treated, you have to wait with a plastic bag over your head until they die, then get checked again before you can go home.

When we got back, Dawn bagged up all the pillows and washed the bedding. You have to bag up anything you’ve been in close contact with; lice dies after 24 hours without a host.

And it was the same procedure in reverse on Mother’s Day, to un-bag and do all the laundry, which I did dutifully while Dawn went to church and the kids slept in — and we had brunch at Beth’s, then dinner at our house — and come Monday morning, I realized I’d forgotten Dawn’s card and wrote in it while wearing my bath towel before work, then got a text from her at the office saying, thanks — and I wrote back, “looking forward to getting home tonight and having a drink,” — and we did, and then I climbed into bed, tried to get Charlotte to come in with me but she wasn’t into it, so I slipped off as the sun went down, and got up to do it all over again.

Categories: Memoir, musings, writing

Tags: daily grind, flash memoir, humor, mid-life crisis, parenting, short form, William Pearse writer, work-life balance