Bed bugs, Bunnies,and Fairy Tales....

"Sleep tight; don't let the biter bugs bite." my mom pulled the covers up to my chin and turned out the light with a kiss. I snuggled down into the bed to go off to the land of dreams....cozy in the knowledge that I was loved.

Okay, so maybe that scene is a bit idealized. The reality was something more like being told to go upstairs to bed several times and stalling until the very last "preview" of the upcoming episodes of Emergency, Adam 12, or the Brady Bunch was done. Then slooooowwwly dragging my rear end up the stairs to see how long I could delay until my dad stood up from his chair and took a threatening step toward me, then I would scamper up as quickly as I could, calling "good night" from the landing and I would hear my mom call back with the aforesaid phrase.

Then I would grab my current book and come into the glow of the hall light and, sitting on the cold floor, pick up the tale until my dad and mom would make their way up at ten p.m., to go to sleep in their room, at which point I would grab my book and scamper to my bed so that I could lie there pretending to sleep when they would stop in my room seconds later to check on me.

I don' t know for how many years I successfully pulled off that trick of reading in the hallway light's glow, under the pretense of fear of the dark in order to make them keep that light on until they went to bed and I was ostensibly sound asleep. I used to keep my small desk light on. That is, until my dad one day got wise and went to touch the light to see if it was cool....and burned several layers of skin off on the bulb. Yeah. He was NOT too happy with me that night.

As an adult I thought of that bizarre good night blessing about the "biter bugs"...what the heck are "biter bugs"? I'd wondered about that occasionally as a child but accepted it blindly as kids do things that later, they realize made NO sense at all.

For example.
I had a rabbit...a white rabbit that I'd been given one Easter as a gift. Now, I was quite young then....these were in the days in Colorado long before I'd strolled curiously through a kindergarten door. They were long enough ago, that when my mom let Peter hop around free in the outer porch/laundry area of our home in Denver....I would , in terror, retreat to the top of the wash machine....looking at him with fear and fascination. He was cute; WHEN HE WAS IN HIS CAGE...when he was loose, he was a ferocious wild animal; of this I was sure.

I used to feed him blades of grass in his hutch in the back yard...poking them through the chicken wire front and watching them disappear in quick nibbles of his sharp, square front teeth. Yes, he was cute all right ....IN HIS HUTCH.

One sad day...I believe it was also a Sunday, as we were amidst the process of dressing for church, that my mother told me that Peter had gone the night before to bunny-rabbit-heaven....OoooohHH no! "Why mom?"
This was my first experience with death...and it was mysterious to me...Why would something be alive and moving one minute and dead and still the next?
My mom paused...and faltered...and then dropped the ball in a classic fumble:
"I guess Daddy fed him too much grass."
OH, so this was all DADDY's fault. My four year old self, tensed in anger at my foolish father. How could he have made such a dumb mistake? Didn't he know that would happen to MY rabbit?

And for YEARS I believed with all my heart that my dad had killed my rabbit by feeding him too much grass.

I don' t know when the epiphany came that, WAIT A MINUTE! Rabbits don't die from having a little too much grass!!! Peter's death WASN'T my dad's fault!! And a great load of anger at my dad which had existed in some subconscious level of my being suddenly dissolved in to the light of adult reason.

Well, the biter bugs were like that too. I had no idea what they were, but I sure as heck didn't want them nibbing on my little toes....

As an adult finally one day I made the connection between "biter bugs" and "bed bugs"

....UGH. REALLY?

Who in their right mind would plant the idea of bedbugs into a five year old 's mind as he was ON HIS WAY to the precarious precinct of dreams and nightmares....??
But parents have done it for generations.

I just had an evil thought.

One day , I'm going to hang that rhyme on my husband as he makes his way to bed! His latest obsession is with the current plague of bedbug infestations in the greater NYC area.
I wonder if he would even be able to get INTO his bed with that thought fresh in his mind??

Odd that we give a child a burden to bear that some adults can't even handle. And kids, in their blindly accepting, ignorant courage, merely hear it as a familiar, comfortable b'rucha. (blessing).
Children can accept and integrate so many things and incorporate them as normal...things that should NOT be accepted...and things that adults should NOT hang on them....and I'm not talking about bedbugs and fairy tales either...

Oh Lord, protect and bless these innocent ones...