Nitpicking

Have you ever found yourself feeling glad that you haven't had to deal with a certain situation and then it happens to you? No matter how many precautions you take or how you manage to avoid something (whether you take great pains for prevention or you think / hope that it won't happen to you), inevitably you have to deal with it. My daughters were not totally amused when they found out what I was blogging this time. I would have felt this way a while back, before it happened to me and these facts of life can happen to us, so now I want to proudly say, I've mastered it and know how to deal with it and there's a funny side to this learning that I want to share with you too. Enjoy this life lesson! 

When my family and I moved to Bali, I was given two pieces of advice that stand out in mind. The first was to hire a chef. The second was to be equipped with head lice solution and fine tooth metal combs purchased from Singapore. It is impossible to buy this stuff in Bali and according to my children, head lice love living in the bamboo at Green School (I have no evidence to verify this and head lice were prevalent in their old school in squeaky clean Singapore). The challenge of Bali is that with no proper combs or solutions, infestations are hard to control. Now, I must tell you that you do not get this kind of advice when looking up websites on living in Bali.  No, you have to be connected with the Bali underworld to understand the finer and more practical details of living on a paradise island. I chose to ignore the first piece of advice as it felt far too decadent to employ my own chef. I did, however, take note of point number two, as my family had managed to avoid these wretched things while living in Singapore, in spite of notes being sent home from school warning parents of outbreaks. Determined not to be 'caught out' in Bali, I raided many chemists in Singapore. Like a soldier ready for war, I was armed with all sorts of head lice paraphernalia ready for any kind of attack in Bali.

It wasn't until nearly two years later, when I had to deal with head lice and we weren't even in Bali when the outbreak occurred! The long summer break had started and my children were staying at our Singapore office. I had just returned from a great, start to the day coaching session, when my children soon brought me hurtling back down to earth. As I opened the office door, I was hit by the suspicious smell of freshly bleached toilets. The team in the office were head down, quietly getting on with their work but something strange was going on at the far end of the office.  I suppose you can call it a mother's instinct but I knew my girls were up to no good when I found the three of them huddled in the small office bathroom. My youngest daughter came out to greet me, her hair looking as though it had been dipped in a bowl of cooking oil and proudly announced 'We have nits Mummy', as though she had won an award for academic achievement.  Luckily the word 'nits' is a common UK term used to refer to head lice, so my Singaporean team wouldn't necessarily understand what we were talking about. Extremely embarrassed, I quickly scooped up my daughter into the bathroom, gesturing to my children to be quiet and hoping that nobody had heard in the office. Somehow all four of us managed to squeeze into the small bathroom, the smell of bleach strongly wafted past my nose and my other two daughters' blonde hair had turned dark with oil.

"You haven't put bleach in your hair have you and why does your hair look so greasy?" I whispered alarmed.

"No Mummy, we've used the bleach to kill the eggs and nits and we've put baby oil in our hair so they slip out" my middle daughter rationalised intelligently and led me out of the toilet towards the sofa, where she showed me a lid off one of the toiletries that was filled with bleach.  As she tried to hand over the evidence to me, I jumped back in fright, wanting nothing to do with these blood sucking things.  The lid fell straight onto the navy blue sofa, instantly changing its colour to blue with a big streak of white and we had just sold it to the next tenants because we were moving office at the time. What had happened to my good start to the day?

After a full investigation, it transpired that all three daughters had head lice and because we had all been sleeping together in close proximity, my middle daughter who seemed to know what she was doing found four eggs in my hair too!  On this news I freaked out and the whole office discovered our plight.  Curious to know what these nits looked like, my daughter took on the role of a National Geographic Correspondent and demonstrated with a magnifying glass to the office what an egg looked like (a miniscule brown dot) and what a head louse looked like (tiny creature with little legs that ominously moved). As all my head lice stuff was in Bali, I ran out to the nearest chemist.  It seemed that every chemist in Singapore (well that I visited) had stopped stocking metal combs, so all I could do was buy solution and hope for the best.

I thought I had put the whole episode to rest, when a month later, there was a resurgence of head lice on one of my daughters. These troublesome things were still persistently hanging on. This time though, I knew what I was doing, I had mastered the art of 'nitpicking' and was ready to deal with those annoying bugs that so easily camouflaged themselves. Like an obsessed monkey, I picked out every little egg until we were officially nit free (I also found the use of a head lamp worked really well).

While busy nitpicking, I thought to myself what a great analogy it was. Things happen in life that we hope to avoid but when we do have to deal with these situations, we come out stronger, and even more so when they come back to haunt us. I once had a very nervous participant attend my Presenting workshop and he explained that he had even changed his job from accounting to IT to avoid presenting - something that absolutely petrified him. His organisation decided that it wanted to change its IT system and the participant not only had to present the new system to all staff, he had to influence them to use it too. After the training and when he was 'out there' presenting, he gained the confidence to deal with it. Sometimes we have to face situations to be able to deal with them.

When it comes to nitpicking, I've been there, done it and know how to deal with it!

"Maybe who we are isn't so much about what we do, but rather what we're capable of when we least expect it."

Jodi Picoult

Be re-assured of what you're capable of when you least expect it.

Janet