Bonus Guests

Oct 10, 2024

The bonus guests came with the house.

I didn't notice them when we first looked at the property in Charlottesville; I first saw them lurking the day after we moved in while arranging stuff in the garage. My neighbor Louise called them cave spiders; the internet calls them cave crickets. They congregate in cool, damp places. They're big, but are no threat to humans... unless you count the threat to our psyches, because they don't just hang there on the wall, they jump. I'll spare you a photo, because they are just too creepy for a column even during Halloween season, but you can read about them here if you have a morbid side.

There's nothing much you can do to get rid of cave crickets once they've decided that yours is a party house except make it boring to them by caulking cracks and running dehumidifiers and eliminating clutter. I used to announce out loud that Louise had a cave cricket beer keg hidden in her garage, but the crickets knew I was lying. When I was in the garage, I was never sure what was a shadow and what was a cave cricket, so I decided not to look too closely at the walls and hope for the best.

Parenting, too, comes with lots of cave crickets—those things no one tells you about when they're advertising parenthood, but which come with the territory. All of us have our own horror stories of the unexpected creepy thing hanging around preparing to pounce. The difference with parenting, though, is that it's actually your job to look at the walls so you can figure out whether what's threatening your family are just shadows or something worse.

Standing between your kids and life's unexpected guests takes courage. But when you face them head-on, you'll find out that sometimes the shadows are just that—shadows. Other times, they're cave crickets, or something that can actually bite. That's when you'll find it in you to break out the bug spray.

—Deb