Playing with Spiders.

I'm scared of spiders.
They make me feel a bit sick in my mouth.
But raising two children, I don’t want to let them know this, and I definitely don’t want them to feel this. So I try to be brave.

This happened yesterday.

Busy cooking dinner, I overhear chatter about a spider.
I wander into the living room to find Ed trying to scoop up a spider onto a tiny peice of paper.
The spider breaks my ‘bigger than a 50 pence piece’ rule.
Little bit of sick in my mouth.
“Please stop!” I yell.
Remembering that I have to be brave, I re-assess my attitude and say;
“We need to put him back into the garden where he lives. Let me go get a glass.”
So I run off frantically trying to find a glass and an envelope/piece of card, anything that will hold firm. I end up with the ‘too floppy for comfort’ leftovers of a notepad.
Having placed the glass over the spider, gently squeezed the paper underneath without breaking all eight of his legs, Ed then starts to sob.
“What’s wrong?” I ask
“I wanted to give him this spider house” he replies holding the tiny bit of paper, now folded in half to make a tent-like shape.
“So let me get this straight” I ask, “you want me to lift the glass, risk the spider running away, just so I can put the spider house in there?”
“I just want to see him walk through it” he sobs.
Great.
Oh my.
Somehow, from somewhere, I gather up my nerves and quickly lift the glass, place the spider house in and put the glass back down on top.
Phew.
Cheers then fill the house as the spider walks under the spider house, back out the other side.
Then I’m allowed to go put him in the garden.
I empty the glass outside the front door, finally happy with the situation until Ed announces that he needs the spider house back.
So I have to go out in the rain to collect a little crappy piece of paper, narrowly avoiding the spider who is making fast tracks straight back to the front door.
I think I got the door closed just in time.

I live in hope that I won’t always feel like this towards spiders. There were days when I wouldn’t have been able to do that and I would’ve just squished it. But I don’t want to raise kids who kill everything they’re sacred of. What would the world come to then?

Ed's spider house under the glass.