Violet loves bugs, she cries if someone steps on an ant and even has compassion for spiders. Her sister tends to follow her lead, but has more of my, “Gah! NOOOOOOOPE” reaction when she’s on her own.
When she was around three I decided to get her this ladybug habitat from Insect Lore. It was an easy set up once you get the larvae and the habitat itself is reusable in case we wanted to do this again.
Violet delighted in feeding them and giving them drops of water. I had her draw pictures and keep a little journal of their stay with us. Then I started to notice subtle signs that they had…matured.
Though I dropped little reminders of how they were going to be so happy when they were allowed to fly free and find other ladybug friends, when the day came, it was DEVASTATION. She kept trying to kiss them goodbye and was just heartbroken because they didn’t want to stick around. I told her that they would be back to visit because they would always remember that she took such good care of them. That seemed to help.
From then on, every ladybug she saw was one of “hers” coming back to say hello. One night in the middle of winter, which here meant it was a blustery 63 degrees outside, a ladybug appeared on her headboard at bedtime. She was so touched that it come to say goodnight to her and I think I started to wonder if maybe she had some kind of ladybug whispering powers because they began showing up all the time.
There were so many of them I started saving them in that habitat I’d held on to so that I didn’t have to keep shooing them out of the window every half hour.
The day I caught over a dozen, I decided to look to Google for answers. After taking a closer look, I realized that they looked a bit different then our hand-raised friends. It turns out, they weren’t ladybugs at all, but Asian Lady Beetles, an incredibly invasive species that bite. They were infesting our home because OF COURSE THEY #^$^$ WERE.
So the next year I decided to to bring more bugs in the house because I could then pretend that I had some say over which ones get inside of this place. Both girls love butterflies, so that was what I went with.
I pushed aside that memory of when I was five and a Monarch landed on my shoulder and as my mother tried to get a picture of this beautiful moment, I sat there looking at this creature with it’s reddish gold wings gently opening and closing while it seemed to be washing it’s face with it’s very long black legs, and oh hey, those antenae are huge! What is that coming out of it’s mouth, is that a stinger?! No it can’t be, it’s just what it uses to eat…..what it uses to eat is right next to my skin…those giant pretty wings are just there to distract me from the fact that this is a BUG and it’s now touching my BODY. I screamed and twirled around wildly trying to get it to off of me while my mother sighed heavily. I think that’s when she knew. BUT I DIGRESS.
The butterfly habitat is a mesh tubal cage and you get live caterpillars shipped to you to populate it with. They wiggle around when they’re getting ready to hatch and once they do pop out, you have to let them go pretty quickly. They keep knocking themselves to the bottom of the cage from trying to fly away and hitting themselves on the walls in the process. That didn’t seem healthy. I’ve had relationships like this.
We released them into the City Park with minimal crying from the children because there’s a wonderfully distracting playground right there.
For the next few years we would see the butterflies of the same breed resting on our stairs outside and I hadn’t noticed this type outside before, so I thought maybe they did remember us.
I decided to watch a documentary on butterflies with Violet and learned that their existence is just horrible– they are in a state of constant pain because of all the metamorphosis and when you see two butterflies frolicking in the air, you are likely witnessing an all too common butterfly rape because the males try to forcefully ground the females so they can copulate with them. And don’t look up pupal rape, just don’t.
So now I watch butterflies with the knowledge that I’m seeing beauty in pain personified, but the girls don’t need to know that.
