I am having serious amounts of trouble keeping my shit together lately. July is apparently Rancho Asshole Bug Invasion Month and no one told me. There is currently a moth in every room of my house, and possibly on every wall. I pick up a towel: moth. I pick up some laundry: moth. I fart or cough: moth. Enough with the drab dusty wings that I have to wipe off my counters after you throw yourself through my fans! Go outside and pollinate something. Shit.

I am getting a little jumpy as a result of the moth mafia, which has evidentially decided to team up and make me pee a little every ten minutes.

Last night I went into my bathroom to re-sharpen the points on my teeth, and there was another bug that has been showing up in excess lately: one of those creepy black garden spiders that will turn up if you do any weeding or rock-moving. I hate those things. This guy was at least as big as a diaphragm. They are blacker than black because they have that look–like they’re covered in velvet flocking or something to better absorb all light and joy in the universe. They were the only thing in my yard in Crown Hill that the chooks wouldn’t eat.

I noticed he was missing a leg and I decided to keep an eye on him as I stood in front of the mirror. Then he started moving across the wall. The way he was walking looked like really jank stop-motion animation, LURCH LURCH LURCH. I was waiting for “Tool” to start playing and I just almost couldn’t deal with it. He started moving for one of our bath towels and I scooched it out of the way so no one would get a nasty shock in the morning.

Of course he took the opportunity then to throw himself off the wall towards me, and I did something I haven’t done in years: I yelped and jumped up on the toilet like a big fool. He started running and I freaked and smooshed him, which is something else I haven’t done in a long time.

Our official policy here is that “spiders are our helpers” and I remind Franny that most aren’t poisonous and won’t even bite unless really cornered. I make a big show of putting non-house spiders back outside if they wander in.

I was raised in a house in the woods that was totally lousy with spiders, among other crawly things. I was taught to smash them, and I guess I was afraid of them because I didn’t know how to identify dangerous ones. I have spent some time learning how to identify spiders in the PNW and I am pretty sure I had a legit hobo spider in my house the other day, which made me very arfy. I have also spent time learning what is fact and fiction about spiders.

I think the worst experience I ever had with spiders was when I was fifteen. I was skipping school, something I did pretty infrequently in the tenth grade, with a guy I was seeing who could drive. He drove me to his house so we could hang out and neck a little while–it was pretty innocent.

We had just started dating and it was the first time I had been to his house, which was tucked away in the woods like mine was. His house was ginormous. I didn’t really realize until that moment that his parents were loaded. We hung around for a while and he said, “Hey, do you want to see my parents’ wine cellar?” My ignorant ass had never seen a wine cellar, so I jumped at the chance in a cool and nonchalant fashion. “Sure, whatever.”

The wine cellar was cut into the side of a hill and had a short wooden door that forced you to duck to actually enter. I could see rack after rack of bottles as I stepped into the musty and cool air. Once inside, you could stand up, but just barely. My boyfriend grabbed the pull cord to turn the single light bulb on as the door swung shut and the cellar grew dark.

Click. The door and the walls were FREAKING COVERED, like mosaiced, in spiders. I had the simultaneous urges to pee, vomit, and die all at once. I started coolly and nonchalantly gibbering. “SPIDER SPIDER SPIDERS SPIDERS!” I made him open the door and ran from the cellar and halfway across the yard, shaking off the spiders that I imagined were covering me. The rest of the day my boyfriend took advantage of my jumpiness by going “What’s that?!?” and pointing to every little piece of fuzz on the rug or bedspread.

I squirmed as I wrote that.

This morning Franny mentioned that she found a spider in her room last night. “It was cute, Mom. It was kind of green and it crawled all up and down my arm.” I had to hold onto the edge of the counter for a minute.

“I had a spider in the bathroom last night,” I replied. “What did you do?”

“I put it outside the living room window,” she said. I told her that was good, but that she shouldn’t play with spiders, just in case they bit her.

“Plus, if you’re playing with them, they can’t do their very important work,” I said.

“Okay, Mom.”

I guess my plan to take control of my fear of spiders and not pass it on to the girls is working out with Franny. She is a bug lover. A few weeks ago, she actually let a potato bug spew babies all over her hand. I thought I was going to DIE.