Contributed by :Kylie Ardill of SpiltMilk
Reprinted with Permission from Woman Links
There’s a big hairy spider in our bathroom. It’s living there, high up on the wall in the corner above the bath tub.
I hate it and I tell it so frequently. It’s not that I want it there, I ask my husband to kill it regularly — not because I am scared of it (NEVER!) but because I don’t want my 20 month old son to eat it when it drops off the wall and tries to attack me mid-death roll. No, I want my husband to kill it so I can keep my son out of the way.
It knows, every time I send my husband in there, he tells me it’s gone. It’s some super intelligent breed of large hairy spider that KNOWS that I am ordering it’s execution and so it hides when it hears him coming.
It’s my fault that it knows — I was sitting on the toilet the other day, (seat down) while my son was having a bath. I was watching over him to insure the big hairy spider didn’t try to kill him with a viscious fast-pasted crawl down the wall followed by an attack bite. I am not sure what I would do from the other side of the room with my feet up on the toilet — I might have thrown a razor at it with a precisely-executed maneuver, thereby killing the spider and saving my son (who would be none the wiser), or I might have just screamed scaring the life out of my son and in no way ending the spiders reign on the bathroom wall. I suppose I could have done nothing and hoped that it drowned in the bath water before it got to him.
Anyway — the reason it knows is because while sitting there on the toilet in contemplation of my dilemma it occurred to me that if I am to be truly spiritually aware then possibly I should embrace the spider as one of God’s creatures. I was thinking maybe I should conquer my hatred of the beast and begin to love it and welcome it into our home. After all, maybe it was here first.
My theory is that it is tuned in to the universal ebb and flow of things and it sensed what I was thinking and therefore, doesn’t believe that I really want to kill it and so thinks that by hiding when it’s executioner comes home that it is doing me a favor. It believes that my desire for it’s downfall is simply human conditioning and that I plain just don’t mean I want it dead.
So, it’s all my fault and I am now left with two options:-
- The spiritually aware route: Learn to love my new resident, point it out to my son and tell him how beautiful it is, ask it if it wants to have a shower after me when I am done, offer it some toothpaste to brush those gigantic fangs with. Accept it as one of Gods beautiful creatures and rejoice it’s presence,
- The not so spiritually aware route: Get me a big ass can of Raid and blow half of it on the sucker until it is dead, dead, DEAD!
I am leaning toward option 2 — I am trying to grow and be aware of the universe but I draw the line at letting some humungous hairy thing (other than my husband) live in my bathroom. Still, I have made progress, this will be the first time that I will experience guilt when I am holding the trigger finger over the can of Raid.
It will pass at the first depression of the spray, but I will feel it just the same — now that’s progress!
– Kylie
Submitted by: Kylie Ardill. Kylie is editor and creator of online parenting e-zine, Spilt Milk and has been working at finding her spiritual feet for the last 7 years. She is Mum to Samuel and operates the Internet Design business, Visions in Ink.
