by Lisa Piper

Created on: June 11, 2010

Spiders. Those eight-legged, creepy, crawly critters. Just seeing one will send a chill running down my spine and my adrenaline start to pump. I am definitely arachnophobic.

I can’t explain how I developed a fear of spiders. I remember being a little girl in my backyard in New Jersey. At that point, I was hardly afraid of anything at all. I picked up a daddy-long-leg that I had found walking across the ground. I was holding it by one of its legs, when it fell off. The only thing I had left in my hand was the still twitching leg. I quickly dropped it and checked the ground for the rest of the arachnid. It was in front of my feet, just sitting there. I thought that because its leg was still twitching that I had hurt it. Wanting to put it out of its misery, I stepped on the daddy-long-leg.

From that moment on, I have avoided every spider to the best of my ability. I guess it’s not so much that I’m afraid of them hurting me as much as the fear that I may hurt them, again. Either way, I can’t be near them without panicking.

I was doing really well at avoiding spiders until I started learning to drive. My grandmother bought a car for me. All I had to do was learn how to drive it. We had many acres of yard for me to practice driving on and trees for me to park between. How hard could it be?

I got into the car and grandma got into the passenger seat to ride with me. My grandfather stood outside and watched. I began slowly driving the car around the yard getting a feel for driving. I thought I was doing great until I looked at grandma. She had a look of horror on her face, but I noticed she was looking at the roof above my head instead of out the window.

I looked up and quickly realized it wasn’t my driving that had frightened her so bad. It was the large spider wandering the roof of the car. The only thing I could think about at that point was to get as far away from the spider as quickly as possible.

I jumped into grandma’s lap trying to escape the tiny box that I was trapped in with the spider. Grandma wouldn’t let me out and I couldn’t figure out why. As it turned out, I had forgotten to stop the car, so it was rolling towards a tree. Grandpa caught up with the car and opened the driver’s side door. He jumped in and stopped the car. We were all a bit shaken up, but were okay.

We look back on this moment and laugh now. I finally managed to get my driver’s license and started driving on a regular basis about 2 years later. I make sure to check the car for little arachnids each time I get in the car because grandpa is no longer there to stop my runaway car.

Learn more about this author, Lisa Piper.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.