Itsy Bitsy Spiders

It was after 2 a.m. night before last, when Hubby’s and my phones started dinging. Imagine our joy upon seeing this missive from our 12-year-old daughter:

You may ask, why the heck was our daughter awake at 2 a.m.? Right. Let’s address that one first:

Did we ask her to go to bed earlier? Yes. Did she? No. Were Hubby and I sufficiently exhausted that we didn’t even try to argue and just went to bed ourselves? Yup. After all, it’s summer vacation, and she has no responsibilities this week, so, no point expending energy on bedtime enforcement.

So here we are, 2 a.m. on a workweek, and there’s this mildly alarming text about a bedroom spider infestation. Now, over the years, Hubby and I have developed a triage system for family emergencies. If it’s anything medical– like, “I can’t stop coughing” or “My nose is bleeding” or “I think I’m going to throw up”– then it falls into my domain. As do most things mental health-related, like panic attacks, insomnia, and nightmares.

I also handle any rodent situations, given Hubby’s legit musophobia. (Do we really tend to have family emergencies involving rodents, you may very well ask? Um, yes, as a matter of fact, we do. See 2013’s A Mouse In My House and 2016’s Oh, Rats!) Though, Hubby’s musophobia has evolved such that he can now at least handle dead ones. This was a necessity as we have a hunting cat who like to bring us “gifts”, and if I’m not around, Hubby either has to endure a bloody rodent corpse on our doorstep, or summon the inner strength to bravely scoop it up into a doggie poop bag and trash it. Also, we have a pet snake that needs frozen feeder mice thawed and dangled in front of him every week or so, and once I was away with the kids when it came to feeding time. We had to talk Hubby through the process on the phone, and there may have been a shot of Scotch involved, but P.K. the corn snake got successfully fed.

But, I digress. Back to our triage system for family emergencies. If the word “spider” is anywhere in there, then it’s totally in Hubby’s domain.

I hate spiders. I used to be quite irrationally afraid of them, bordering on arachnophobia. But then I went to medical school, and got bitten by the medical missionary bug. I ended up practicing (literally, practicing) tropical medicine in some of the most godforsaken resource-poor settings one can imagine. I’ll never forget my first night of a six-week rotation at a remote field clinic in Las Cruces, Guatemala, near the Mayan ruins of Tikal. There was no plumbing, and only a composting outhouse. My hosts warned me: “If you have to use the toilet at nighttime, make sure to shine your flashlight in to scare away any black widows before you sit down, they like to make webs in there and we’ve had a couple of buttocks bites…”

Then there was that time in Ecuador, and a brief stint at a working farm in the lowland tropics, where the tarantulas were so large you could HEAR them walking across the floorboards of our bungalow. That was freaky, but much preferred to a tarantula silently surprising you in the shower. This is what happened to my roommate (another American medical trainee), who ran outside– OUTSIDE– soaking wet, shrieking, and wearing only a towel, much to the delight of the groundskeepers who, definitely doing everything they could not to bust out laughing, rescued the poor critter from us hostile tourists, gently releasing it into the gardens.

These and many other fun experiences forced me to get serious perspective on my borderline arachnophobia. After all, there are many more important things to be afraid of, like pandemics, climate change, MAGA…

But I still hate spiders. So, I looked at the 2 a.m. urgent text from our youngest and saw the words “spider infestation”. I poked at Hubby. “Hon? It’s spiders. All you. Good luck.” I rolled over and went back to sleep. Hubby meanwhile sleepily and quite annoyedly went to check out the situation.

Indeed, our daughter’s cluttered, messy, crumbs-and-wrappers-strewn room appeared to be home to a recently hatched spider’s nest, with hundreds of little specimens on her bed, ceiling, and walls…

Nope, not something that anyone can fix in the middle of the night. So Hubby made sure our pre-teen was set up to sleep on the downstairs couch, closed her bedroom door, and went back to bed. I’m pretty sure I asked him something like “Everything OK?” and he said “We’ll deal with it in the morning.”

In the morning, I went in there and looked at these critters real close. Why? To ensure that we weren’t dealing with a nest of venomous spiders, like Yellow Sac or Brown Recluse spiders, which are not uncommonly encountered in old New England homes. I verified that there does indeed appear to be an American House Spider infestation in her bedroom. Harmless, but gross.

And while my irrational fear of spiders is much tempered, researching this and looking at close-up photos of a wide variety of arachnids creeped me out so bad it made me want to vomit. I hate spiders.

Thankfully, I had to work yesterday, so Hubby started the process of dealing with the issue. But what does that even mean? It was like any infestation horror movie: “There’s so many of them!” I mean, her room is so disgusting, can we just blow it up? Or maybe pay someone to just come in and empty it out? Start over with fresh new everything? Actually, let’s just do that with the whole damn house.

Realistically, though, we’re going to declutter and deep-clean that room. She’s got a bunch of boxes and trash bags and has started making some decisions. We rolled up her shag rug and hauled it to the garage. All bedding is stripped and being laundered. And on and on.

Sigh. This is now our main weekend activity. Everyone else, go enjoy the beautiful early summer weather! We’ll be home with our itsy bitsy spiders.