Bugs

I’ve written before about my dislike of bugs and how I particularly dislike bugs that are on me. I don’t know how my fear of bugs developed. They say that all phobias are learned. I guess we wouldn’t just naturally develop an irrational fear of insects – especially since we’re so much bigger than them. To my knowledge, though, neither my mom nor dad was ever afraid of bugs.

My earliest memory of being frightened by a bug was when I was about five years old. My siblings and I think a couple of cousins and I were in Charlie’s backyard, a couple of houses down from ours. Charlie was an older kid and he was showing us something in the grass – I can’t remember what. Maybe he had just gotten his dog, Ivan. At one point, while looking down, I saw that a huge grasshopper had hopped onto my shoelaces. An uglier thing I could not imagine. I screamed and took off running for home, hoping the tiny monster would have to let go of my shoe with the force of the wind I generated from my speed. I ran straight back to my house and breathlessly told my mom about my horrific ordeal.

Not long after, I have memories of sitting on my friend and neighbor Cheryl’s driveway. We would often sit there, I remember, as we contemplated what we would play next. Every time we sat on Cheryl’s driveway, I was uptight, jittery, and couldn’t relax. I was always ready to spring to my feet. Why? Because of the giant black ants that always populated her driveway. I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than those ants, petrified that they would start crawling up the leg of my pants or shorts. I don’t know why Cheryl’s driveway had so many ants and yet our driveway, just three houses down, did not. Her driveway was asphalt and ours was cement – maybe that had something to do with it.

A recurring nightmare of mine when I was a kid, was of me, lying on my stomach in the dirt with thousand and thousands of ants crawling all over my back. Weird, right?

There are a host a reasons why the Central Intelligence Agency would never recruit me to be one of their agents, but one primary reason is probably because if I were ever in the position of being interrogated by a some Russian operatives, I would likely spill the beans at the mere threat of being placed in a box with a bunch of bugs.

Throughout my childhood, I retained my fear of all things buggish but my fears evolved into my fearing spiders the most. I would regularly call my mom into another room to “take care” of a spider I spotted in the corner of the ceiling. (It was like we were mobsters – “take care of” meant “kill that thing.”) A spider’s actually touching me would send me into convulsions – jumping and waving my arms around like a lunatic.

Over the years I’ve also developed a keen sense of knowing that there is a spider in the room before I’ve even spotted it.

So, I’m about twelve years old, I guess. I am “up north” in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where my parents have a summer cabin. It is August and sunny and hot.

My friend, Terry, seven years older than me and now a retired state trooper, is driving his family’s old and well-loved, white two-door Chevy, a car they keep at his family’s cabin year-round. It has a bench seat in both front and back. There are at least two other people in the car: my sister Julie and our friend Cindy, Terry’s younger sister.

We are driving along the wooded trails of the Hiawatha Sportsman’s Club. The driving trails are mostly packed sand with tall wild grass in the center. Whenever it is sunny and hot, as it was on this day, you can see grasshoppers flitting this way and that along the trail. (This why I was never a huge fan of hiking along these same trails when it was hot and sunny.)

We have the windows down because it’s hot and the Chevy doesn’t have air conditioning. I’m sitting in the backseat when a grasshopper flies through one of the windows.

Hysteria. I am having what one might call a conniption. At least we’re not wearing seatbelts – not sure the Chevy even had them – so I am able to jump from my seat. Standing to look behind me, I cannot see where the grasshopper is. And then another one flies in! God help me!

I cannot adequately describe to you the sheer terror I felt. I can’t believe Julie likes grasshoppers any more than I do but she appears to be having a good time, as evidenced by her laughing. Terry, too, seems to be enjoying himself. While I’m screaming for the people in the front seat to close their windows, Terry has his arm stretched out the window and is catching those flying fiends in his fists, and throwing them into the backseat. I am beside myself. Not only is he petrifying me, he’s escalating the whole chaotic scene.

Between my regular screaming, I am yelling at Terry to stop the car and let me out. I am exhausted from my hysteria. As I’m squeezing myself behind his seat and out his car door, Terry warns me that the grasshoppers are worse outside. I do not care. I cannot think of a worse agony than being confined for another minute in the Chevy with a gregarious gang of grasshoppers.

I step into the sunshine and immediately recognize Terry’s truth: the grasshoppers are worse out here. But no matter. I spend my time alternating between brushing imaginary grasshoppers off my clothing and dodging real life grasshoppers as they fly through the air. I refuse to get back in the car until I can be assured that all grasshoppers have been removed from the its interior. (I tell you, my heart is racing as I’m writing this, remembering my terror.)

So, fast-forward more than a few decades. I’m still afraid of spiders and most bugs, but I’m a parent now and I have an example to set. I don’t want my daughter to learn my phobias and adopt them as her own. I take particular caution to not unnecessarily freak out when I see a bug if Meghan is nearby. I try to remain calm and cool when I kill spiders. (I still won’t kill a spider by stepping on it because I know, with the treads they have on athletic shoes now, a sneaky little spider, by hiding in one of the grooves of the sole, could easily survive the squash, only to crawl up my leg – angry this time – at a later time.)

And while I have tried to prevent my passing my fears onto my daughter, I have failed. My daughter will scream – one of those high-pitched, ear-splitting screams that only little girls can produce – at the sight of a spider (or anything that looks like it might be a spider), even if it’s on the other side of the room. I don’t know how it could have happened. I kill bugs for her upon request. (It just occurred to me that she must have already been afraid of spiders before I started killing them for her. Why else would she want them dead?) She couldn’t be afraid of spiders because of the way I kill them, could she? You know, I screaming like a banshee waving a box of Kleenex® over my head? Nah. ✿