I had just picked up my sons from school, and we were trying to get everybody loaded in the car. I was in the middle of strapping the baby in his seat, when my second son, who stood behind me, made an innocent observation: “Mama, there’s a spider on you.”
For you to fully understand the significance and weight of this innocent observation, I must tell you that I am the daughter of a woman who used to beat spiders to death with a broom when she found them crawling anywhere—all while shrieking hysterically. I am a woman whose son once dropped a spider on my lap because he picked it up and thought it was cool, and I ran away screaming in the middle of a worship set at church. I am also a woman who has had a spider drop into my lap while I’m driving, and I nearly drove off a cliff.
So when my son said this, I immediately felt the fear make my legs grow warm and soft. Heat rushed over my chest.
“Get it off,” I said rather calmly. I was quite proud of my calm.
My son merely stood there looking at my back, so I thought maybe he was kidding. Boys are pranksters, after all. I shook my head, tried to still my fluttering heart, and said, “You shouldn’t joke like that.”
My third son, who was already in the back seat of our van, leaned over at that moment to look. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “It’s white. It’s almost in your hair.”
Something about the way he said it told me he wasn’t kidding. This was not a joke.
It was not my finest moment. Imagine, if you will, a woman flailing in the middle of a sidewalk near an elementary school, trying desperately to swat the spider off her back—and then add about twenty percent more hilarity and ridiculousness. That was me. I finally slammed my back up against my van, bruised my shoulder blades, and finished off the spider—or so I hoped. My sons couldn’t tell me one way or another, and I felt it crawling up the back of my neck all the way home.
Husband checked to see if it was gone when I walked in the house. He didn’t see anything, and I’m hoping that’s enough.
Some people, when they see me out and about with all my sons, will occasionally say something to the effect of “You’re a lucky mom to have all these boys protecting you.” This is usually when I’m walking into Target with Batman, Spider-Man, and Yoda beside me because they didn’t want to take off their costumes and I didn’t have the energy for a fight. But you get used to hearing things like that when you’re the mom of boys.
The problem, however, is that my sons are just as afraid of creepy crawly things as I am. They see a bug they can’t identify, and they high-tail it out of there. A scorpion moves toward them on the floor, and, rather than smash it with the shoe that’s on their foot, they skedaddle. A bee once chased one of them, and he nearly ran through a wall trying to get away.
When you become the mom of a son, you imagine your sons standing by your side, swatting away things like spiders and scorpions and bees without even batting an eye. These are the boys who forget to drain the tub and leave the toilet seat up and don’t want to hang up their clothes. This protection is supposed to make all that worth it. I’m not supposed to even think about insects or arachnids or whatever might come crawling my way.
When we got home, there was another spider on the floor, large and black and heading straight for the ten-year-old’s stinky feet (though I can’t fathom why). He refused to kill it, saying it needed to be relocated—and yet, when we all wondered aloud who might do the relocating, he pointed right at me.
We argued about it until we looked again and the spider was gone.
The worst kind of spider, in my opinion, is the one you know is there but can’t see.
This is an excerpt from Hills I’ll Probably Lie Down On, the fourth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
(Photo by Nicolas Picard on Unsplash)
