Lately, a term of endearment I’ve been using for my children is love bugs. I’m not sure when I started saying it with more regularity, but I think there’s something to the fact that I like how it sounds when pluralized. Now that my son is one years old and on the move, I’ve been reaching for it more often to address my two children as a group. “It’s bath time, love bugs,” I’ll say. Or, “Come on, love bugs, let’s go for a walk.”
My daughter loves bugs in a way that I’ll never understand. For her fourth birthday, we gave her a bug viewer for catching and magnifying insects. Several days later she ran into the house to show me what she’d found with her dad in the garage. “It’s a false widow,” she said, so excited she almost couldn’t get the words out. I, too, felt a little bit speechless watching the threatening looking spider crawl slowly around the acrylic viewer, magnified by the lens. I try hard not to pass on my fears to my children, though I did use the Seek app to verify my husband’s identification of the bug, mostly seeking reassurance that it was truly a false widow.
Yesterday, my daughter brought a bag of bug-themed Valentine cards to pass out at preschool. I can’t take credit for the puns on the cards, but they made me laugh: You’re so fly. You’re crawl-some. You make my heart flutter.
I published a short essay recently about my daughter’s love for bugs and the terrifying article I read while pregnant with her about the coming insect apocalypse, about letting my daughter love what she loves, even when I fear it may end in heartbreak. I’m still not sure how to hold these two things together, my loves and my fears. But that seems to be the work of parenting.
I also read and reviewed an anthology, out yesterday, called Wanting: Women Writing About Desire. You can read my review, here, if you like. (It touches on the astonishing courage and craft it takes to write about desire.) What I considered most while reading this anthology is the relationship between desire and selfhood. In one of the book’s essays, contributor Ann Tashi Slater describes attending a showing of Nora: A Doll’s House—Scottish writer Stef Smith’s adaptation of the Ibsen play. In it, three women who lost themselves to marriage and motherhood reclaim their selfhood onstage. They chant a line I can’t stop thinking about: “My heart beats for me, my heart beats for me.”
May that be true for all of us.
Bugs and kisses.
Kaitlyn
Here are a few other buggy things (just trust me!) I’ve read and enjoyed lately…
A stunning essay on identity and metamorphosis:
I have always been disillusioned with the limits of human growth. Even as babies we resemble our future selves, our skin merely stretching, furring, and wrinkling as we age. But insects have a much more fantastic notion of growing up. Their rigid exoskeletons cannot expand with growth, so they molt. They shed old skins and form new ones that are billowing and soft, able to hold more body than before. Some insects like praying mantises undergo transformations with some bodily continuity. They hatch from eggs into tiny wingless adults called nymphs. Nymphs molt into more nymphs, growing larger and sprouting wing buds until the final molt, when the adult emerges like a new, green leaf. But the more famous kind of metamorphosis is more total—that quintessential transmogrification from a caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. Born as an egg, growing up as a larva, congealing into a pupa, and unfurling into a winged adult.
The seven best bugs of children’s literature.
Young children (no surprise!) are apt to identify with the tender struggles of those of piddling size. Young children are also very comfortable with a level of masquerade, costuming their fears and ventriloquizing hopes and worries through the experiences of the overlooked and disparaged. For the kinder-set, tiny is MIGHTY but also DEEPLY RELATABLE. Sometimes these stories act as an interspecies bridge. By relating to other creatures who are outsized by the world, kids who are instinctively repulsed by insects—who may have even squashed, swatted, or dismembered them in real life—may be moved to see “pests” differently.
And a poem about mothering an insect-loving child:
“Dead Butterfly” by Ellen Bass
For months my daughter carried a dead monarch in a quart mason jar. To and from school in her backpack, to her only friend’s house. At the dinner table it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast. She took it to bed, propped by her pillow. Was it the year her brother was born? Was this her own too-fragile baby that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world? Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house? Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there? This plump child in her rolled-down socks I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me and carry safe again. What was her fierce commitment? I never understood. We just lived with the dead winged thing as part of her, as part of us, weightless in its heavy jar.
"I’m still not sure how to hold these two things together, my loves and my fears. But that seems to be the work of parenting." Beautifully put and perfectly captures my thoughts as I learn more about parenting