Spiders. The very mention of them probably makes your skin crawl. I know that I have spent most of my life utterly terrified of them! Partly to blame for that would be the many times I watched the movie Arachnophobia when I was younger. If you haven’t seen it, I highly suggest that you never do! It cemented in my head the already irrational belief I had that spiders were out to get us. Hunting us down and knowing where we slept. Surely, they were always lurking in the shadows waiting for their chance to strike. I get it-they aren’t exactly the friendliest looking species and certainly like to startle us with the element of surprise. Hiding in shoes, behind the shower curtain, or even making their way into your bed. Eek!
When I was little, maybe eight or nine years old, I woke up one night and could see a dark spot on my pillow. I thought that it must be a piece of fuzz from one of my stuffed animals or something, so I switched on my bedside lamp. It was not fuzz, it was a huge house spider and it had been watching me sleep! What if I hadn’t woken up?! Where would it have gone? What was its plan? I quickly woke my parents to come and destroy it, but of course it had run off into my sheets. After a midnight spider hunt, they found it and as you can imagine, it was a bit of a challenge to go back to sleep that night!
Fast forward to my first year of marriage in Central Texas. My husband was in the Army and away at training, so it was just me. As I sat on the couch, I saw something run by out of the corner of my eye. Was it a mouse? No-it was a massive spider. I jumped up, ran to the other side of the room, and called my parents. They were all the way in Washington of course, but what else was a nineteen-year-old girl supposed to do? Let it drag me under the sofa, never to be seen or heard from again? I knew they couldn’t actually help me catch this thing, but I needed moral support! As I frantically explained the situation to my father, he talked me through the terror. We established it was too big to squish because guts would be everywhere, and what if I missed? Then it would know my plan and go hide somewhere else. I got the vacuum out. After what was probably ten minutes of pep talk from my father, I got up the courage to turn it on and rid my couch of that terrible beast! Thank the Lord for dads. Phew, that was finally over! Or was it? I started to wonder if it could crawl back out of the vacuum bag and hose. So what did I do? I used tape. My husband came home a few days later to a taped-up vacuum and I explained the ordeal I had survived.
I don’t know if you’ve been to Texas, but compared to Washington spiders, their spiders seemed like monsters to me, and some are very poisonous! I knew that the famous Brown Recluse lived there but hoped I wouldn’t run into any. That hope was quickly dashed when our cat stuck his head into our fireplace that turned out to be infested with them! He got a bite on his ear and nearly lost the whole thing. After jamming jelly-covered medication down his throat three times a day and covering his skinless ear in ointment, the skin eventually grew back and all was well. Still, this gave me even more reason to believe that spiders were evil.
When our first son was three years old, I was driving us home along with his baby brother when I noticed a spider making its way down my car window-on the inside of the car! I wasn’t in a place I could pull over, so for what felt like an eternity but was really only a few minutes, I just kept as still as I could while praying the spider wouldn’t drop into my lap. Of course, I also shouted-a lot! Enough that my three-year-old was very curious as to what was happening and also concerned. I got home, crawled over the passenger seat to get out of the car(obviously!) and we all made it inside. To my surprise, I felt bad for reacting so intensely about the spider. I had an audience now, after-all. The last thing I wanted for my kids to be terrified of something just because I was. So, it began-my journey to conquer my fear of spiders. I didn’t know if it was possible, but for their sake I had to try!
How did my spider-saga turn out, do you ask? Well, it turned out that the more I learned about them, the less scary they became. I got my boys a lot of National Geographic Spider and bug books, which I admit were not fun to look at in the beginning, but they loved them! We read about them, watched nature shows about them, and my oldest son even enjoys holding them. I did make a rule that he couldn’t bring them inside! He would swipe a garden spider and observe it with wonder, always returning it to a tree where it could spin a marvelous web and catch lots of bugs. He is even my go-to spider catcher, and when a giant house-spider emerges in our basement he scoops it right up in a cup and releases it outside. I know they don’t always survive that change of environment but at least they have a chance! There are times when I still must vacuum a hard-to-reach arachnid that I don’t want in the house, but I’m proud to say that I no longer tape up the vacuum. My kids and I feel bad when they can’t be saved, which I never thought would be the case. I didn’t think I would ever warm up to the idea of spiders. It’s easy to believe that once we have a strong fear of something it’s just part of who we are but that’s not true. Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t like finding them inside and they definitely startle me from time to time, but I’m here to tell you it is possible to be ok with spiders.
Are you afraid of spiders? What are some of your fears? I encourage you to try to keep your cool next time you encounter one and see what happens, and even learn more about it if you can. Especially if your little ones are watching!
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Read more of Maria’s contributions to AllMomDoes here.
