Reptile Disfunction

Though I have no recollection of when it began for me, there is a medical name for the condition I have. It is called Ophidiophobia. Fear of snakes.  We're not talking "Oooh!  Get it away from me." in girlish-squeals-fear. We're talking full-out panic, hysterical crying, embarrassing running out of the store if I see a toy one terror. I don't really even like to talk about them so I don't know why I am telling you this except maybe in self-preservation to make sure you understand. DO NOT COME NEAR ME WITH EVEN A PICTURE OF ONE!!!

I read about some celebrity who had this phobia and his "friend" thought it would be funny to rent a boa constrictor and bring it to a party at his house. The celebrity wound up in a mental hospital for several weeks. That would be me.

When my boys were small and begged to go in the Reptile House at the zoo, I risked their tiny lives by letting them go in by themselves while I waited outside.  And when  Jake was in first grade and I went as a helper-mom on his field trip to what was supposed to be to a nature farm with a few wolves and badgers behind chicken wire fences and then the ranger said "And now for our treat!  Georgie is coming out with our wonderful pet python," I abandoned the ten little darlings I was supposed to be chaperoning and high-tailed it for the bus before you could hear the squeak of the door!

When the teacher came to look for me I was cowering behind the bus driver's seat. "Are you all right?" she wanted to know."Oh, yes," I said. "I'm just in here praying, thanking God that at least somebody gave me some warning!" I don't really remember the ride home but I think Jake somehow got attached to another group and he may have been pretending that their leader was his mother.

I've heard there is something called "Snake Away" in a can that you can buy at the hardware store and sprinkle around the yard to repel them. But  I can't go buy it because I'm sure there is a picture of a snake on the can. 

I have tried to get  braver over the years and I think I may be succeeding. I can now be in the same room with a newspaper or magazine that I know has a picture of a snake in it. And when we bought a house in St. Louis and later found out from the neighbors that snakes had been spotted in the common back yards I eventually did go outside. You approached the yard from our very high deck so I stomped really hard on each step and yelled. And banged pans together that I kept on the deck for that very purpose. We only lived there about a year.

I guess Jake finally forgave me for the field trip debacle because when right after we moved here my worst nightmare came true and I spotted a snake in the laundry room, I called him and he got out of bed in the middle of the night, got dressed  and came over to rescue me.  I hid with my face to the wall in a corner of the living room instead of jumping in the car and heading out-of-state (only because I would have had to go through the laundry room to get to the garage) and let him deal with it. "You can come out now, Mom," he said. "I killed it. It was a pipe cleaner."

Well, it was a very long, brown pipe cleaner. Anybody could have made the same mistake. I'm thinking my Ophidiophobia may be blending in with Haptodysporia, which is fear of fuzzy things.