I am only slightly arachnophobic - and only because once I casually leaned over to squish a spider with a scrap of kleenex and when it *popped* what appeared to be 50 MILLION FUCKING BABY SPIDERS came pouring out of it and took off in a million different directions. I'd only had a scrap of kleenex because there was no box in the room I was in and so I had to run away from the ruptured egg sac of spiders pouring into my house and down the hall to get something that I could use to try to kill them. When I ran back half of them were missing so I did the best I could but UGH GROSS. And now before I kill a spider I make sure that 1. I am well armed and 2. she does not appear to be "with 1 billion eggs." (If she does appear to have a large egg sac, I make my husband do it. I'm liberated like that.)
I'm actually lucky. This EXACT same occurrence happened to a friend of mine - when she was 7. And somehow the spiders started pouring all over her. She is ARACHNOPHOBIC.
You can tell my phobia is not that great because when my husband managed to kill all of the fish in our $200 fish tank and turned to me and asked, "Can we get a tarantula?" I looked back at him, shrugged and said, "Sure." (It was WAY cheaper than continuing to release "Nemo" to the toilet ocean.)
So my husband and the kids head off to the pet store to buy a Tarantula. They buy a Rose-Haired Tarantula and promptly name it "Rosie." Great job. That happens to be my Sister-in-Law's name. Luckily she is not easily offended.
Anyway, Rosie moved into the erstwhile fish tank and lived there undisturbed and quite happy for some time. Actually until July 3, 2009.
On July 3, 2009 my husband and I took the kids to a bonfire at a local beach. We built our own small fire and watched the much larger one while we roasted Marshmallows and melted chocolate onto graham crackers. Fireworks are illegal in Massachusetts but the neighbors didn't care and launched a show that looked like "the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air" including some parachutes that erupted and floated away down the beach for the boys to chase. We stayed out past 10pm.
When we got home we tucked the kids into bed in their underwear exhausted at midnight and sat down to watch a late recap of the Sox game. At 1am I came up to bed. My husband was right behind me but stopped to lock the doors and turn off lights (we hadn't gotten to the Ottoman stage yet.)
All of a sudden I hear him say, "Oh fuck, OH FUCK! Rosie's gone. ROSIE IS GONE!"
"What do you mean gone?" I ask. Not permitting myself to understand.
"GONE." he answers. He does not sound calm.
I go into hypercalm mode. "What happened?" I ask.
We look, together, at the terrarium and see that the holes in the top for the water filter and the thermometer from it's fish tank days are no longer covered by the thick cloth we had put over them. We hadn't really thought that it was necessary, believing that she couldn't climb the walls of the tank but apparently my baby girl had pulled the cloth toward her exposing the holes at the back and Rosie made her move.
We started looking. First we looked under and around the tank. My heart was in my mouth but we didn't find her. We looked in the curtains - 3 pairs of them that reached floor to ceiling in that room. We took the baseboard covers off the baseboard to see if she was there. "She can climb through the TINIEST hole into the walls and we'll never find her." my husband said, HELPFUL.
There is an entire 16' wall of books in the room her cage is in. We looked all over the shelves. We looked under the chair, under the (infamous) Ottoman. We looked under the couch. "She could be INSIDE the couch." my husband said as he was lifting it - and I was underneath it. HELPFUL.
Then my husband says, "Hey, if we look for the next 3 hours and DON'T find her, will you feel better than if we just go to bed right now?"
I just look at him like "There is NO FUCKING WAY YOU ARE GOING TO SLEEP WITH A TARANTULA LOOSE IN MY HOUSE. NICE TRY. ALSO, ASSHOLE."
He gets the point and keeps looking.
I go into the kitchen to look under the cabinets. Nothing. I have to go to the bathroom which is on a long hallway that connects the kitchen to the TV room. I go into the bathroom. Before I sit down I check under the toilet seat. JUST IN CASE. I check the entire room. I pee. I leave the room, hit the light and turn toward the kitchen. And then I stop.
I have NO IDEA why I stopped. But slowly I turned around and THERE SHE WAS. Walking slowly out of the tv room into the hallway. Now the tv room had hardwood floor and the hallway is tiled and as she walked you could hear her legs hitting the floor. It sounded like my fingers do now, tap, tap, tapping on the keyboard. Click, click, click. I froze. "She's here." I said. My husband was in the dining room. He froze. "Where?" he called.
"Here." I called back, still frozen. "Where?" he asked again, also frozen.
"Here." I said, completely annoyed that he was requesting me to form words. By definition, here means, "WHERE I AM," right?
He recovered enough to remember what HERE means and walked into the hallway where he promptly froze again. He grabbed a container that measured 4"x4" and began to creep toward the BEAST.
"That's way too small." I said and ran down to the kitchen and came back with something much bigger.
Now let me interrupt my story to tell you that chores in my house are assigned 3 ways: Things I want to have control over (like grocery shopping and bill paying,) Things I want NOTHING to do with (like trash and mowing the lawn) and things that one of us has brought on ourselves (like returning soda cans for a nickel instead of recycling them or WRANGLING FUCKING TARANTULAS)
So there was NO DOUBT in either of our minds who was going to be roping Rosie back into her tank.
I handed him the container.
He snuck up on her. Now when I'd seen her she'd been moving slowly and then she stopped but when he put the container over her she MOVED. I've never seen her move that fast. She SCURRIED to the other side of that container. Luckily he got the whole thing down before she could get out and luckily I'd just emptied my bladder in the bathroom.
We slid a piece of cardboard under the container and carried her back to her tank. We put her in gently-ish and duct taped the cloth cover to the top of the tank.
It was 4am.
Since then we've met our next door neighbor who is allergic to peanuts. One day when she was at our house (with her epipen) my husband took Rosie out of her cage and let her crawl all over him. Then she crawled all over the kids. Nothing happened.
Now they take her out all the time and taunt me because I have NEVER EVEN TOUCHED HER.
And I don't even care.
Happy 4th of July!
Even tho I READ the post title and KNEW what was possibly coming, I read it anyway. And now? My heart is pumping really, really fast. And I threw up. And everything is getting a little hazy...
Posted by: Pua | July 01, 2010 at 08:15 AM
Ok, ew, ew, ew, ew. I don't kill spiders in my house, that's a rule. Now, thanks to your egg sac story, I will no longer be in a room in which a spider is being killed.
And a pet tarantula? I'd rather die than get a pet tarantula. Sick.
Posted by: Nicci @ Changing the Universe | July 01, 2010 at 09:07 AM
Omg! I almost ralphed reading this. How the eff big is this abomination that a 4''x4'' container WASN'T LARGE ENOUGH?! Also, my ex always wanted a tarantula; I told him, ''Sure! If I also can get a pair of thick-soled combat boots.
Posted by: sylvester_33 | July 01, 2010 at 09:14 AM
I have arachnophobic especially after seeing the movie...spiders are scary..
Posted by: D H-Arza | July 01, 2010 at 09:16 AM
The bedrooms in my childhood home had molding about 7 feet up on all the walls(a foot below the ceilings). My mother woke up screaming one night as hundreds of newly-hatched spiders fell onto her face and her bed. She can no longer watch Arachnophobia.
Posted by: sylvester_33 | July 01, 2010 at 09:22 AM
Spider sodomy is illegal in Texas. I'm not saying that's why I moved away but I live in Jersey now and let's just say there are less spiders that walk funny in the Lone Star state now.
Posted by: furiousball | July 01, 2010 at 09:24 AM
We don't have many spiders in our house. The house centipedes tend to get and eat them. Some of these suckers are huge and they can move fast. I have an unspoken truce with them. They can live in our basement undisturbed but if they come upstairs they are fair game. Over the years, we've had less and less run-ins with each other, though when we do I'm the designated centipede assassin (also spiders, ants, flies and other bugs).
Posted by: TechyDad | July 01, 2010 at 09:30 AM
omg, my worst nightmare. People freak when they find out we have snakes. Spiders, never!!
Posted by: Mamatink | July 01, 2010 at 09:46 AM
I, too, once had a traumatic egg sac experience. It still sends chills up my spine thinking about it 16 years later.
Now, your story reminds me why I will ALWAYS have a dog or a cat. Because no one can convince me that we need other varieties of pets. Dogs and cats trump all so I'll never have to give in to rodents of any sort or reptiles or spiders or fish or birds. Vacuuming up dog hair may be a bitch, but it beats having a poisonous snake loose in the house at 4 a.m. You are a saint.
Posted by: Donna | July 01, 2010 at 09:56 AM
I had the same experience with the million baby spiders. It was in our college apartment, me, two other girls, on chairs with a broom. Scary!
Posted by: Nikki | July 01, 2010 at 11:12 AM
I'm confused. Is it BECAUSE your neighbor is allergic to peanuts that Rosie climbed all over him or were you going to stab Rosie with the epipen if she exhibited menacing behavior? And did he know that you were going to do this tarantula crawl or were you and your husband just fucking him? Cuz THAT would be the kind of thing that would really make me laugh!
Posted by: Suz | July 01, 2010 at 11:25 AM
I absolutely fucking hate spiders. I am terrified of them. If I see one before I go to bed I will have nightmares. Nightmares about spiders in my bed. I will end up stripping the bed in my sleep and wake up in the hallway with my husband going "the fuck?". When I was in Jr. High we went on vacation as a family. My dad's friend rented what was supposed to be a very nice cabin. It was a fucking single wide trailer. It was Owahee Dam (and I know I spelled that wrong) in South Dakota. There were spiders EVERYWHERE. If you stood still for a second they would spin webs on you. The trees were white with webs. Our "cabin" was nasty as all Hell and you could lay in bed and hear the spiders in the ceiling. It was horrific and that's when my nightmares about spiders started. I am severely arachnophobic now. Crazy how I still read this post even though it said not to! LOL
Posted by: Steph | July 01, 2010 at 11:40 AM
I'm only arachno-EW-ICK, so I figured it was safe to read through. The egg sac story makes me glad that I've gotten over my fear of 8-legged beasties enough to trap & evict them instead of squishing!
And for what it's worth, I would never touch Rosie either.
Posted by: Micrathene | July 01, 2010 at 12:07 PM
I really, reallllllly wish I had listened to your disclaimer on this post. Because now my skin is crawling.
Between this and Shine's recent off the cuff comment about spiders crawling up from her shower drain (PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME THAT WAS A JOKE AND DOESN'T ACTUALLY HAPPEN, OMG) I'm going to be even more vigilant now (if that's even possible).
Posted by: Kimmers | July 01, 2010 at 01:24 PM
I would totally freak if a billion baby spiders were all over the place after I splated one. Hell, I'd do good just to splat one... when my daughter finds one - I make her kill it! I'm all... it's no big deal, it's just a spider, get a shoe, knowing damn well I wasn't going to get near it. That's horrible parenting.
Short tarantula story of my own. My hubby had one before we moved it. Kept it in a fish tank and had never gotten out until IT DID. I came home to find her on the wall - about a foot over my head, so I close the extra bedroom door, stuff some blankets under the door and wait for him to come home to capture. Only she was no where to be found when he came home. A few days later, I was the lucky one who found her right beside the couch when I was reaching down to pick something up under the side table. Something told me... look before you reach and there she was belly up barely twitching her legs... eww, I'm getting goose bumps. She died and we did not get another one.
Posted by: Mmdrama | July 01, 2010 at 03:49 PM
::faints:: There is no way in hell I would let me husband have a Giant Spider as a pet. You are a brave woman. And as for the spider releasing billions of babies... That made my heart pound I probably would have fainted.
Posted by: Jenny @ Life After Yes... | July 01, 2010 at 03:57 PM
You are the bravest woman in the world. This is how things would have went down should Rosie had escaped in my apartment. a) We would have checked into a hotel immediately. b) We would have called a real estate agent from our hotel room to put our apartment on the market. C) We would have simply said good-bye to all of our belongings, lest the Beast follow us to our new home in a box of knick knacks. If no one wanted to buy our home for obvious reasons, we simply would have burned the bitch to the ground. Seriously, I don't know how you did it.
Posted by: Paula/adhocmom | July 01, 2010 at 09:07 PM
Other pets are fine with me, but no spiders or snakes. Furry or with feathers for me...I stay out of trouble and don't cause heart attacks that way.
Posted by: HexingThoughts | July 01, 2010 at 09:36 PM
So check it:
My friend's friend's casual acquaintance brought home a Christmas tree, right? And one night the Christmas tree started trembling violently.
And so the acquaintance tried to figure out what the hell.
And THEN, the tree basically exploded into a fucked-up nest of baby spiders. The tree was a SPIDER NEST.
Holy God, I hate that story.
But I liked your post any way.
Posted by: San Diego Momma | July 01, 2010 at 11:45 PM
I am so arachnophobic I had a little vomit in my throat the entire time I read that.
Kudos to you though, Kit. You've made me laugh, cry, snarf, and want to throw up. If you make me pee my pants next, I'm sending the Depends bill.
Posted by: Paxochka | July 02, 2010 at 08:07 AM
This post was terrifyingly awesome.
Posted by: Hour23.wordpress.com | July 02, 2010 at 11:46 AM
I don't like spiders at all. I scream, jump up and down and scream some more. With that being said. I was putting on my makeup when out of the corner of my eye I spot a spider. I screamed, jumped, and almost poked my eye with the mascara wand. That damn spider almost caused an eye injury.
Posted by: Christi | July 02, 2010 at 01:39 PM
Hi! Discovered your blog through your Twitter account after you started following me (thanks for that) and am just sitting here cracking up.
That baby spider story reminded me of a movie I saw in the last 80's about some kind of religion called Santeria, which in my best guess, is a cross between Catholicism and voodoo.
ANYWAY,the ONLY thing I remember about that movie is a scene where a girl is looking in the mirror trying to pop a zit. When she finally does--instead of pus, hundreds of tiny spiders crawl out of it. ICK. I still feel kind of sick just thinking about it.
Thanks again, and I look forward to reading more!
Posted by: desbah | July 07, 2010 at 08:03 PM
UGGH - reminds me of being trapped in the shower when one of those horrible things showed up and decided to explode her OWN egg sac... ALL OVER ME! I don't think I have ever, ever been the same...
Posted by: Elizabeth | July 09, 2010 at 02:04 AM