I am Officially Terrified of our Garage

We have spiders here in Missouri. Like, a lot of them. I’m not afraid of much. I don’t care about snakes, mice… I could be around them all day. Spiders freak me out. They look like little skeletons running across the floor. There really are no words to describe how I feel when I see one.

I’m okay if they are smaller than a dime, although getting up to exact dime size, does make me shriek. If they get bigger than that, well that’s just ridiculous. I don’t see why they need to be that big. It doesn’t make any sense. We’re not in the Mesozoic Era. They don’t need to eat dinosaurs, why do they need to be dinosaur eating size?

My fear has grown significantly over the past 3 years. I was very, very traumatized by a spider that was in our apartment when I was full blown pregnant with my twins. Until this week, that was the biggest spider I had ever seen in my life. It was so hideously huge, and I was so big and unable to maneuver, that I had to call my dad to come and kill it. I pretty much cried for 15 minutes while I waited. Trauma!

So, I go into our garage to throw some diapers away and there it is! The biggest, ugliest, fattest spider I have ever seen. It was black, at least the size of my full palm. I yelled in complete horror for my husband and stood shocked and startled.

My mother in law ran to me first and asked WTH, I just pointed and don’t even remember what gibberish was running out of my mouth. She asked where the spider was and I practically hurled her at it. She was stunned. Jaime came running down and was also shocked. We handed him a shoe and I let him know that if it got loose, I was moving. He mooshied it.

I still feel sick thinking about it. I hate killing things, but that was a “him or me” type situation. I know that thing could have eaten me in my sleep. After the incident, I did a little research…

Enormous spiders like that in Missouri, totally common. They can live up to 25 fricken years! I also found out from arachnologist estimates, that in a single acre of land in Missouri, there can be anywhere from 30,000 to over 2.5 million spiders. Just ridiculous.