Spiders

In my youth, I had a spider phobia. As a teen, I watched some cheesy B grade movie with obviously plastic spiders on strings being used as giant spiders and was creeped out by it.

When my kids were relatively young, I had to woman up and protect them from Wolf spiders in Kansas and Sun spiders and tarantulas in Southern California. That helped.

It's a therapeutic technique called flooding. Enough exposure without getting hurt ramps your phobia down.

But the cure for my phobia was homeschooling my kids and thereby learning more science than college ever taught me.

They loved dinosaurs and we bought Jurassic Park and prescreened it and helped them watch it comfortably at shockingly young ages because that's what they WANTED.

We watched ALL the prehistoric anything that ever aired. Any sciency anything about life a zillion years ago and we watched it.

Ditto snakes, spiders, and on and on while my five year old held my hand and reassured me I would be okay. So starting well before officially homeschooling, actually.

So one day, we are watching more of this kind of thing and the narrator is saying "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting prey the size of house cats." And I blurted in reply to this IDIOT "No, it wouldn't! It would be on LIFE SUPPORT!"

Because spiders don't have lungs and they don't grow that size anymore because the current atmosphere on Earth won't support it.

So unless your giant movie spider is in a powered space suit to survive, I'm not buying it. And I'm no longer terrified of giant movie spiders.

And somehow the real earthbound spiders are more or less just another bug to a gal who grew up playing with things like rolly pollies and daddy long legs.