Hopper At Large

I was looking forward to a peaceful night of "me time" one evening when my husband was out with a friend. I was going to listen to my iPod and bake a pie for his pot luck lunch the next day. After I put the kids to bed, I put the dog out. As I closed the door behind her, a huge grasshopper buzzed and sputtered through the closing door at the very last moment in a plane crash landing. He disappeared into the curtains. This thing had to be four inches long. I cannot stand bugs, especially grasshoppers and crickets. It's a very intense phobia. I have nightmares and I get the creeps just thinking about them. The really small ones don't bother me so much. It's the ones that are too big to smack and kill without a big crunch and guts everywhere...the ones that jump or fly and are big enough so that you can make out their faces. You can see their shiny eyes, their coarse body hair and antennae. Shudder. If a nasty one gets on me, a scream bursts from my lungs and my body thrashes until I'm free. I could cry.... I'm filled with so much adrenaline that I could probably even fly.

I felt myself panic as I tried to block his entry a moment too late. It was like that slow-motion moment right after you trip and you realize that you're not going to pull out of it. You're going down. I felt like that. Mayday. The enemy had invaded, and I was going down.

I have to get him out fast.... I'll have to trap him. I went to get a towel that I could throw over him. I was anxious. I was on my own, no one to help me. I knew I wouldn't be able to relax in the living room until he was out. At least I know he is in this room. Now, I've got to stay on him.... I can't let him migrate to another room and sneak up on me later. I thought seriously about waking up Emma and Ethan and having them get it. I've been trying not to pass on any of my neuroses to them. I try not to use fearful language or freak out over a bug when the kids are around. It's really tough in the moment. I usually just end up explaining after I have freaked out that Mommy just doesn't like bugs. Why? Because they're ugly. There goes my kind-to-nature lesson.

"Kills bugs DEAD," Ethan often repeats from the commercial. "That's not very nice for the bugs..." he adds.

I can't focus or relax at all knowing that there is a huge, meaty, muscly, bony, googly-eyed grasshopper in my living room. He shouldn't be too hard to find since he is so big. But I was petrified. Disgusted. He was one of the brown ones; he couldn't at least be one of the pretty bright green ones. I called my neighbor and friend, Katie. She was in bed. Get out of bed. This is serious, I thought. She wouldn't come over, but she offered some moral support. I begged a few other friends to come over and hunt it down, even offered to pay someone twenty bucks. No one seemed to grasp the urgency of the situation. My neighbor had suggested I get my dog, Daisy, after it. Not a bad idea. Daisy loves the kids' big, inflated, bouncy-balls. She chases them all over the house. They now belong to her. I thought maybe I could stir the grasshopper out of hiding with the ball, and then Daisy would see it and be all over it. So I threw the ball over and over at the curtains and Daisy was having a good ol' time, but the bug was still at large.

I had no choice but to wait until my husband came home. I went to the kitchen and tried to put it out of my mind enough to bake his pot luck pie.

When Rodney came home, he didn't seem as concerned as I was with finding and extracting this brown, creepy, crawly, erratically flying and jumping intruder. Rodney casually looked under the chairs, behind the curtains--no bug. He's moving on. He even expressed his doubt as to whether the bug was even in the house.

"Oh, it's in the house. I assure you."      

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I felt a little braver now that he was home and suddenly motivated to prove to him just how big and nasty this bad boy was. So I got down on my hands and knees and searched.
"Ohmygod, there he is! There his nasty self is, right under this chair. Ew!" Thank God.

Rodney came over and lifted the chair.... But it was just one of the kids' little action figures. Dang.

So Rodney gave up. And I gave up too.

The next morning, I told Ethan and Emma: "There is a big grasshopper in the house somewhere...in this room. A Big. Huge. Brown. Grasshopper. Is in this room somewhere. He's lost." Their faces told me that they did understand that this was not okay.

"A big, huge grasshopper?" Ethan repeated as his eyes scanned the room.

"If you see him, let me know right away so we can get him back outside," I said.

"Okay," said Ethan. He mentioned it now and then from time to time.

My neighbor called to check on me the next day. She asked if it had been found and if she needed to come over today. "He's dead," she said with certainty. "Daisy got him." She sort of...gets me.
I hoped she was right.

Days went by. There were moments that I'd forget all about him. And then I'd remember and stand up from the couch. What's that tickle on my neck?! I was jumpy. I know you're in here, you nasty, nasty thing.

It had been five days since the invasion. I had pretty much resigned to the fact that he was dead. We were eating breakfast in the living room when Ethan said very calmly, "There's a big, huge grasshopper in the living room." I looked at Rodney. I smiled. He remembers things so well. "There's a big. huge. grasshopper in the house," he said again matter-of-fact-ly. He just looked at us. I laughed at his Mommy impression. It's funny hearing your own ridiculous words on the lips of a three year old. He always likes to get confirmation, acknowledgement. He repeated it again. He always repeats things again and again until you repeat him and confirm without a doubt that he is correct, and he is being heard.

"Yes, there is," I confirmed. "Let's not talk about it while we're--"  I saw it from the corner of my eye, easing forward with his disgusting stick, jointed legs. It looked like he was about to take sputtering flight--leap in an unpredictable direction--

I threw myself from the side of my chair and stumbled into the floor. I screamed in horror. I got to my feet as I pushed myself further from "it."  The kids were screaming too, and they clambered all over me with looks of terror on their faces. This sent the grasshopper into frenzied flight. Poor Ethan's eyes were tightly shut, his wide-open crying mouth. Emma looked over her shoulder with absolute terror as she climbed up my arm. Mommy, mommy, mommy! Rodney was yelling at me: "Chill out! Calm down!"

Chaos.

I ran out of the room with the kids strapped onto my body. I laughed and laughed. I couldn't stop. I tried to calm the kids and undo the damage that I had just done to their psyches.

"Mommy is so silly! She shouldn't be afraid of a little hopper!"

Their looks of terror faded into looks of confusion.

Rodney got the hopper out and showed us through the window that it was in fact out of the house and all could return to normal.

Whew!


*When the kids were 2, they called grasshoppers "hoppers" because of the movie they love, A Bug's Life, where the bad guy is a grasshopper named Hopper.