Parenting - by Darylynn Starr Rank
September, 2004

As usual, I have a friend. She grew up on a farm on another continent. She was a daring kid, adventurous, bold. Explored the surrounding woods, loved climbing trees, and especially loved walking across the tops of waterfalls. She worked constantly to help her parents. She‘d take care of the animals, feeding them, cleaning their pens. Whatever had to be taken care of. 

She went to school, studied hard, grew up and travelled. Settled in Vancouver, utterly on her own, went back to school, got her degree, got married, all thousands of miles away from home – or anybody else she knew. As I said, adventurous. She’s a tough cookie, too. Runs marathons, scuba dives, and so on.

But like all of us she has her ‘weaknesses’. She’s terrified – completely phobic –  of spiders. We had a conversation about it the other day. I hadn’t known. She’s so darned outdoorsy. But if she sees the tiniest spider on her bedroom ceiling she won’t fall asleep. She’ll lie there for hours, competely panicked, imagining it climbing down the walls and crawling on top of her.

She doesn’t usually talk about it. We all have fears and we tend to live with them without thinking too much about them (unless they really get in the way). But there we were, chatting about her panic. Abruptly she said, “You know, when I was a kid, on the farm, for heaven’s sake, I was pretty okay with them. I didn’t love them, but I wasn’t totally terrified.  They were all over the place.”
 
“So what happened?” I asked.

“I don’t really know,” She thought about it. “Oh, yes I do! I know exactly!” She proceeded to tell me ‘exactly’.

“I was in the barn one day, and I had to climb up to the loft to get a bale of hay. But when I got there I saw, right at the point where the roof is super low, a huge, really really huge spider. The biggest one I’d ever seen. 

“And I had to walk right under it. But the very worst part was that I had to bend down to get under that low part of the roof, so I couldn’t even keep an eye on where the spider was! It was so hard! So I stood there talking to myself like an idiot, finally took a deep breath, bent down and scurried underneath. And I was sure I heard it moving so I was scared to death it had jumped down on me. But it hadn’t. It was still hanging off the beam. And then…” she said, and actually shuddered.

“And then,” I prompted.

“Then I had to do it again to get back out of there! I had to bend down and walk underneath that horrible beast a second time. I was terrified!”

“So that’s when you became phobic?” I asked. 

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Did you tell anyone?” I asked, a bit suspicious because I knew a lot about her family.

“I told my parents.”

“And they said?”

“Nothing. They basically pooh-poohed it.Said I was silly to be afraid.”

“But you were so bloody brave,” I exclaimed.

She paused.  

“Yeah! I was brave, wasn’t I?” she said in a surprisingly childlike voice. “That was one of the scariest things I ever did!  And I felt so proud of myself! I really did. Until I told my parents…”

Until she told her parents. Though I’m not much of a gambler, I’d lay really long odds that she would not be phobic today if her parents had truly seen, acknowledged, and praised her for the courage it took to walk under that spider. 

Take care all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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