She Gets It From Me

It's not enough that I grew up in Wyoming with six brothers, five of them older than me, but I have also lived in two very buggy and cockroachy places (not counting Austin). When I was little, my brothers delighted in chasing me with all manner of bugs and spiders. When you are very little, you really believe it when your bothers tell you that the bug/spider will kill/blind/cripple/make you pee the bed. They even tortured me with bat stories. One day, my mother decided to "clean" the bats from behind the hayloft door. All of the bats flew, except for one. It was a mama bat with a baby on her back. Too heavy to fly, she looked for the first dark place she could find, which was up my pant leg. I screamed and stomped, knowing that I would surely die from rabies, while the rest of my family screamed at me to not hurt the poor mama bat. Remeber, I was the one with the bat heading for her crotch on the inside pant leg! What were they thinking??? But I digress...
When I was pregnant with Suzy, we visited Tehran and I remember awakening to two large roaches crawling on me. I screamed so much, the entire household spent the evening calming me and making me tea and playing backgammon with me. Oh, did I mention that we don't have roaches in Wyoming, or at least none that I ever saw.
Then we moved to Houston in 1981 and promptly moved into a roach-infested apartment complex. The first night there, I remember being "chased" by flying roaches. I swear to you that they were as big as small airplanes and they followed my every move. My screaming caused the kids to scream, so whether Suzy remembers it or not, this was her second exposure to my screaming hysterically due to large bugs.
I remain sensitive and tend to scream. A couple of years ago, I went on a call to a residence for some medical problem or another. When went to the back of the house where the patient was. Right away, I noted that there were roaches EVERYWHERE. I did not put my bag on the floor. Then, something grazed my calf...and I screamed like a girl, positive one of those roaches was heading up my pant leg. The patient's family was apologetic (and hid their laughter) as they locked up their chihuahua, who had licked the back of my calf...