I step into the stall,
turn the knob to hot,
head down before the water.
I observe my barren belly,
and the mole
I should remove
when a spider
crawls, then falls
into the soap.
She must have thought
this a fertile corner
to hatch her hundred babies–
she could not know there is
no sustenance here, or that
gleeful toddlers mock her drowning.
One self-possessed leg searching,
she casts an unrequited thread
but the unborn brood bears her down–
I could fish her out with a tissue,
save her to hope to hobble
into the mouth of a snake but
I dip my toe into the wake
to help her down the drain and say
They were just going to eat you, anyway.
– Teresa Kiplinger
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I wrote this after an encounter with a spider in the shower. At the time, I had been thinking a lot about the paths I have chosen in life, and how those decisions left me childless. Well into mid-life, I remain ambivalent about never having had my own children; the thought sometimes prompts a pang of regret which I do not allow to grow.
In reality, I did not discover the spider until she was mostly drowned. I pushed her to a dry spot with a tissue, assuming she would recover and retreat to her web. The next day, I found she had died where I left her. The addition of the spider's egg sac was an embellishment to suggest her unrealised babies pulling her under like a stone. And my "merciful" gesture of helping her drown to avoid being eaten by her offspring speaks to my election to avoid the sacrifices of motherhood.
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