Gel-Eating Hairbugs

On our way to church tonight Mr. Monk calls out from the backseat, "Mom, do the bugs in my hair eat my hair gel?" I paused long enough to compute what I'd heard and decided to seek clarification. "You have hairbugs?" Mr. Monk replied matter-of-factly, "Doesn't everyone?" Let me take a moment to explain my son, lest you think my children's heads regularly infested with lice. Mr. Monk had been in the back of the car thinking about microbes that live in a symbiotic manner in the hair follicules of our eye lashes and elsewhere on our body. (I was not thrilled to learn about this either, by the way).

In fact, Mr. Monk is coping much better than I did with this kind of knowledge at his age. After seeing Star Trek Wrath of Khan as a kid I wore a stocking hat to bed for months for protection from the ever-so-creepy, albeit fictitious, ear bugs that would crawl through the ear canal all the way into the brain killing its victim. OK, so now you know where Mr. Monk gets his "issues". And my ear bugs were fake! The eyelash bugs really exist! Whereas I've been coping mainly through denial all these years, Mr. Monk has moved past denial and right on into acceptance. The hairbugs exist and they eat, but... what do they eat? I wish I could tell you that I gave him some sort of real answer to encourage his curiosity, but in keeping consistent with my denial, I changed the subject. It did make me laugh, though. Gel-eating hairbugs, indeed!