A Pregnancy Fear I Never Expected

By Veronica

I am the over-reacting type. I know it, and through sheer force of effort I avoid hysteria, but by nature I am a worrier. My sister calls me “functionally paranoid.” My natural parenting style is one I privately call Fearful and Clutching, and it is only the exercise of my reason and the excellent example of my own fearless mother that keeps me from forcing my children to wear helmets when they walk down the stairs. Or wearing heart monitors when they sleep.

Does anyone make those? No, don’t tell me.

Having learned to pry my fingers off my children and allow them to live life, I keep my crazy thoughts to myself. When my girls fall without visible harm, I may think, “That just caused the aneurism that will rupture when she’s sixty,” but I keep it a silent thought. When we play outside, I use insect repellent on them when practical, and if a hovering mosquito makes my internal voice shriek “West Nile virus!” I give no sign of it.

My crazy fears are usually not focused on me. Sure, I have the occasional phobia – heights, spiders, skunks – but I try not to make them obvious in front of the kids. I teach them reasonable caution about reasonable things, but I don’t want them to be the sort who scream when they see a harmless bug. I try to set a good example. I try to keep my crazy from spreading to the next generation.

I am currently in my final trimester of pregnancy, large and round and always hot. My three girls are also hot and cranky in these heavy summer days. They long to get out and play, while I want to stay in and be cool. In compromise, last week I sat on the shady porch with the youngest, while my four-year-old and my three-year-old ran around gleefully in their swimsuits, leaping and screaming in the spray of the caterpillar sprinkler toy that I hooked up to the hose.

My oldest, affectionately known on my blog as Jellybean, got thoroughly soaked, then moved on to other games. She found a stick and a large piece of bark in the woodpile, and pretended they were a sword and shield. She ran around for awhile, slaying fearsome snakes and pirates, then tired of that game. She entrusted her sword and shield to me, thrusting them at my belly and saying, “Hold these!” I lay them on the porch, she ran back to the sprinkler, and I continued to push the baby in the swing next to me.

A few mosquitos buzzed over the baby’s head. I clapped my hands to squish them. I leaned back in my chair, stretching a bit so my belly wasn’t resting on my thighs, and picked up my book to continue reading. After I had read for ten minutes or so, I felt the tickle that says a fly is crawling on me. I held the book up and away and looked down.

I think it was the knees I saw first. Hairy knees. Then the eyes. Moving up and around my enormous pregnant belly, a wolf spider – about 1 1/4 inches across – was crawling out from the underside of my tummy and scaling the gestational Mount Olympus. His (her?) dark, furry body with yellow stripes scuttled brazenly across me as though it had a perfect right to be there.

I shrieked and stood and scraped my book three times against my belly to get the spider off. It finally dropped and crawled off the porch.

Three times. It took three times to get the spider off me.

I’m pretty sure my cover as a calm and rational mother is blown. The girls were busy playing, but a large pregnant woman hopping and shrieking and scraping books against herself is hard to ignore. I may have some uncomfortable questions to answer the next time they see a spider. Or maybe they will just imitate me and scream.

And as if the usual pregnancy concerns were not enough, I now have one to add: when your belly gets so big that you can’t see your shoes anymore, it also means you can’t see the spiders that might be happily nestled below your navel.

Pregnancy just got a little scarier.

You can usually find Veronica blogging at Toddled Dredge, where spiders are unwelcome and the shrieking is kept to a minimum.