Creepy Crawly Invaders
and Why I Hate Them

I was faced with an unexpected moral dilemma when we had kids. How could I explain why Mommy turned every eight-legged creature that invaded our home into insect puree? Telling a child, “It’s wrong to hurt living things…but spiders don’t count because Mommy hates them,” won’t even fool a toddler.

So I made a Bug Box—a small insect condo with cardboard walls and a removable roof (furniture is optional, but I wouldn’t recommend windows). My theory was that I could scoop the offending arachnid into the box, then release it into the wilderness of our backyard (so it could get its exercise stomping back into the house).

Unfortunately, the spiders were watching me the night I made the box, and they sent a Kamikaze bug to test my convictions. Have you ever tried to catch a moving spider (one that appears to be hopped up on espresso) by chasing it with a small box? It’s not an easy task, I’ll tell you that right now. After five minutes of running and turning and lunging, I found the solution. I squashed the spider with my slipper, then used the box as a Bug Coffin. I had conquered nature. Or so I thought.

Soon the snow thawed, and I discovered that not all uninvited guests have eight legs. A freakishly-large mound of dead grass pressed against the outside of our home was the first hint of trouble. That, I was informed by my long-suffering ex, was a Goddamnedmousenest. It didn’t take long to discover that the Goddamnedmice had turned our kitchen cupboards into rodent condos. They’d even removed all the stuffing from my oven mitts and used it as bedding. They had also enlarged the holes around the water pipes (the mouse equivalent of double doors) and had used our pie plate as their…shall we say…lavatory.

After a short but unprintable outburst, my long-suffering ex filled every potential mouse entrance with white gunk, threw out what was left of the oven mitts and put the pie plate into the garage sale box (an aside: thoroughly wash everything you buy at garage sales). He then went into the backyard and performed the Dance of Death on the Goddamnedmousenest.

My job, during this massacre, was to keep our kids distracted in case a mouse  scurried out of the cupboard. They could have suffered permanent mental anguish of they’d seen Daddy clubbing Mickey Mouse to death with a broom. I, on the other hand, would have been unmoved by the mouse’s plight. After all, Mickey Mouse never pooped in our pie plate.

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