If you find me crying in the fetal position...

A preface to my story: I. HATE. SPIDERS.

Honestly, they are my biggest fear. If you were to look up arachnophobia in the dictionary, it would likely have my full name and date of birth. They scare the living piss out of me. I literally have nightmares about finding a spider on my baby and being paralyzed with fear.

So, the other night, in the dim glow of the tv light I was picking up the little pieces of paper things that wind up on my floor a thousand times a day, thanks to Amaya and Kendal, partners in crime. I reached down to pick up some unidentified thing, and IT MOVED! Oh, Mother of all things holy- I just touched a living spider! Living! I can't even touch dead ones. I jump back 20 feet onto the safety of the bed immediately. Amaya is just staring at me like I"m crazy, saying it's ok Mom, and Joe is laughing at my patheticism. He finally gets up and picks the spider up with a tissue, and tries to tell me that it was already dead. Um...last I checked, living things don't move. So, yes it was close to dying, thanks to man's greatest invention-pesticide. Jake, my hero (and bug man) sprays that ingenious liquid all over my house once a month, religiously. But still, it moved, and it was alive and I touched it.

I have heard that one way to overcome your fears is to face them, slowly immerse yourself with them. May I just say that I whole heartedly disagree? My spider anxiety is at an all time high, and I will no longer be picking up the floor in questionable lighting!







Here is an excerpt from the most disturbing website on the web:

Did you know that in seven years if you get bitten by a Wolf spider, you could have no arm left because the wound from its bite eats a centimetre of skin every month and there is NO medicine for the bite. Not all bites cause this reaction, some have been recorded from Black House spiders as well.

Joe realized the full extent of my fear a short time after we were married:


I was showering in his mother's basement, and when I stepped out of the shower there was an enormous wolf spider across the room. Naturally I am paralyzed with fear, not that I could have run out screaming and crying anyway, seeing as I was stark naked. But nor could I step on it- no shoes. And shoes or not, I've never been able to get close enough to step on a spider. So I grabbed the gel on the counter next to me, and started squirting as much of it as I possibly could, creating a thick pool of goo that was slowing that nasty 8 legged monster down. I kept squirting till he was stuck, and then I grabbed the blow dryer and nuked him...all from a comfortable distance away.... and then I left the mess. Joe came home from work to find a glob of crusty, semi-hardened gel with a dark spot in the middle. All I had to say was "spider" and he understood.