Family story time...

Emotionally speaking, she was already pretty close to the edge even before she had been told to clean her room. She had been made to turn off the tv, take a bath, and now, contrary to every 5-year-old instinct, we had inflicted upon her the trauma of putting her toys away before going to bed.

It’s a brutal process, cleaning one’s room. The first step is to sit for several minutes in the middle of what looks like a news clip of a natural disaster, wallowing in the overwhelming enormity of the task.

Next, it’s time to complain loudly that there is too much to put away and if she doesn’t get help she won’t be done before her senior prom. This is usually followed by the parent’s terse rebuttal that it wasn’t too much to get out so it isn’t too much to put away. This, of course, is the catalyst to complete emotional collapse on the part of the 5-year-old. Sometimes the parent, too.

It was along somewhere in this part of the process that she spotted the spider. I knew something was up because suddenly there was an edge of hysteria to her crying. When I entered her room she was backed into a corner, staring at the opposite side of the room.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Aaaaaaaaaaa sp- sp- sp- aaaahhhhhhhh.”
“What?”
“Sp- sp- sp aaaahhhh!”
“Honey! Calm down. I can’t understand you.”
“Sp- Spiiiiiderrrr!”
“Where? Over here?” I had crossed to the general area she was screaming at and sure enough, under the wall heater was what had once been a fairly large spider, but had obviously long since met its maker.

“I’ll get rid of it, but it’s okay, it’s dead.” I tried to ease her fears.
“But it mooo - oo - ooved,” she sobbed.
“That’s because it jiggled on the web,” I pointed out.
“But how come it moo - oo - ved?”

I could see she was not going to be pacified, so I removed the offending carcass and vacuumed the webs. But we had lost all momentum toward room cleaning and I could tell that we would never get it moving again. Sensing that - for now at least - mercy was greater than judgment, I sent her to get a drink of water and cleaned her room for her.