Homesteading: the best form of exposure therapy
Moving back to the country, digging the garden, hauling wood, clearing land, helps you reconnect with the earth. It’s also helpful to overcome fears that you have no choice but to face.
I’ve never been a fan of bugs. I had serious arachnophobia as a kid, loathed earwigs, and was (more rightfully so) petrified of ticks. Cue the move to a rather neglected plot of land and suddenly all of the above were my nearest neighbors.
I’ve always promised myself that I would not be the kind of mom who passed my fears on to my child and so my days became filled with escorting spiders outside (with my bare hands!!!), picking earwigs off the woodpile, and pulling crawling ticks off two and four-legged family members and flushing them.
It was a, “fake it until you make it” situation at first, but after a surprisingly short amount of time, dealing with bugs didn’t phase me at all. I even lead the charge during the great caterpillar invasion and pulled hornworms off my tomato plants (NOT with my bare hands, those things are disgusting).
Then came the rats….I’ve been terrified of rats ever since I saw Lady and the Tramp for the first time at the age of 4. No matter how many friends tell me how amazingly affectionate their pet rats are, no matter how often someone touts how intelligent the species is, all I can picture is the oversized red-eyed demon-rodent perched on the edge of a baby’s crib. So primal is this connection it even eclipses the awful scene from 1984, (though my brain does eventually go there, in graphic color).
The only times I have ever handled rats were when I fed them to my pet ball python. I did not feel bad. In fairness, they were frozen; Bobalouie was as scared of live rats as I was.
So when my dad mentioned the connection between chickens and rats after the girls had been settled in for about 10 months, I asserted (oh so foolishly) that we did not have rats. Seriously, denial is a beautiful thing. Then we started to see tunnels near the coop and my big burly mariner of a spouse joined me in la-la land.
“I think the chipmunks are getting into the duck feed,” he said one morning.
The rational part of my brain was screaming at me that these were not the cute, stripy plague we had been dealing with since we moved in, but their oh so horrifying plague carrying cousins. In the dark of night, some primal Viking part of my brain fantasized about relocating the girls and torching the colony.
Instead, we got traps. Part of hubs’ job is to change traps in the loft at work, so he agreed to take it on. My half-hearted attempt at suggesting we live trap was shot down with a look. The first week, our local fox kit helped us continue in our blissful state of denial as he religiously emptied the traps for us every night, never leaving quite enough evidence for us to face the facts.
Then one morning I went out to free the girls and my dog stopped dead, staring at the trap. There it was, the thing of nightmares. It was larger than the rat trap by a significant amount, and really quite healthy looking, what with all the spilled feed it had been glutting itself on.
I took a deep breath. “I can do this. I’ve let live arachnids crawl through my hands. This is nothing.” I bent to pick up the trap, hesitating at the sight of that naked rubbery tail. The rat seemed to grow in size. My imagination conjured the image of the eyes flicking open and
I straightened up abruptly. My giant beast dog, who had been obsessed with guarding the holes and had personally dispatched more than a few chipmunks, looked as wary as I felt.
I tried coming at it from a different angle: compassion. I usually feel a stirring of sympathy for any dead or injured animal.
“Poor….” I stopped, the words catching in my throat. “….Nope.”
My husband and son were watching Saturday morning cartoons when I came in. I poured my husband a cup of coffee and sat down.
“Ducks and chickens are out. We definitely caught a rat in the trap last night.”
He sighed and looked at my face, knowing me all too well.
“I’m on it.”
Exposure therapy doesn’t always work.