Arachnophilia Teams Up With Insomnia

At this moment, all three children are sleeping in the master bedroom. Mommy, who was ousted as a result of her own absence at bed-time, is sleeping in Madeleine's room. Tonight, Amy had to issue a final exam for the course that she's teaching, so she was out rather late. On such nights, it's often easier to get the children to sleep in one big bed, namely "ours."

But that's not to say that they all go to sleep at the same time. Ian and Madeleine went to sleep practically at the same moment, but Daniel persevered. The topic of the evening was spiders (not my selection). Daniel wanted to know which spiders were poisonous. I have lived a charmed, New England life, as far as this matter is concerned, and I only know of three: the tarantula, the black widow and the brown recluse, none of which live anywhere near us. Daniel wanted to know about each one, in detail. What do tarantulas look like? What color is the brown recluse? (I had to venture a guess on that one...)

He wanted to know how the poison is administered. I told him the spider spits it into their prey; I'm sure that's not the verb, but it's the best I could conjure up at the moment. Daniel found that distasteful, which is encouraging. He wanted to now how poisonous they are. Are there any spiders whose webs are so powerful that a human being could get stuck - immobilized - in one? What does the black widow look like, and how big is it? How do these spiders get into the house? If it were me, at his age, asking these questions, I would probably be trying to gauge whether these spiders can be avoided. I think Daniel's curiosity was far more academic, perhaps as much motivated by admiration as fear.

Questions sometimes came in clusters, but they often came as serial eruptions, interspersed with silence. In the dark of the bedroom, I had great hopes that a minute or so of silence meant that sleep had intervened. But over and over, long lulls were broken with a new, even more specific, perhaps more creative, question about predatory spiders.

But the best line of questioning had to do with work-arounds to the known ferocity of these poisonous creatures. I told Daniel that brown recluses, even though their bites are nasty, really don't like to bite people, and they'll only do so - he finished my thought: if they're afraid. So Daniel wanted to know how one could approach such a spider without eliciting fear. The very best question: what if you're just going to pet the spider - will it bite you then? Or what if you just want to hold it? I can't remember whether the concept of poisonous-spider-as-potentially-lovable-pet was explicit, at this point, or merely implied. I opined, in my species-centric way, that spiders aren't that smart, and they can't discern that you're approaching them with goodwill. In fact, if they see your finger coming at them, they might assume that you're going to - again, Daniel completed my thought: squash them.

Eventually, Daniel actually did stop asking questions, having succumbed to sleep. Looking back at it all, I can't imagine what he might be dreaming about. If somehow the subject of his dreams turn out to be spiders, I'm not sure that they would be experienced as nightmares.

(December 14, 2011)