So I'm driving along to go and fetch my daughter from her friends, it's dark and it's raining. Then I feel something crawling up my leg, which at the best of times is a little unnerving, but when you are travelling at 40mph in the outside lane of the dual carriageway it isn't the time to have a screaming fit. So I calmly breathed my way through it, picked up daughter and drove home. I never did find out what it was crawling up my leg, but it did lead me to an interesting thought - What do you do when something scares you but you can't react?
Maybe it's because you are a parent, trying to keep a little child calm. I remember staying at a friends house in Devon when the children were little, now this house had three floors, the children were staying in the top bedroom.
'Mum there's a spider.' So I dutifully went up three flights of stairs, no sign of aforementioned spider, so I went downstairs again, after assuring them that it had gone.
Four times this happened over the space of an hour, and each time I would go up, hunt for this spider and then go back downstairs.
According to the children it was HUGE and HAIRY. But as far as I could ascertain it was invisible to an adult.
On the fifth trudge up the stairs (it was getting a little tedious by this point), I did in fact find out that the spider was very real and was HUGE and HAIRY, just like I'd been told.
Now my fight or flight reaction tried to kick in (flight, straight back down the stairs and leave it to devour the children - it was that big). But I had to fight the urge, find a cup (it's feet stuck out from under it) a piece of cardboard and pray that I made it down three flights of stairs without this bugger pushing the cardboard out of the way and devouring me instead.
Ok so maybe I am exaggerating the size of this spider, a tarantula it was not, but I'm not a huge fan of our eight legged friends, would never hurt one, just don't like to get too close. But I put him outside, wished him well and went to find a very strong drink.
So again I ask the question, what do you do?
