Bug on Bugs

Bug is, unfortunately, a mosquito magnet just like her mother. Place the two of us in a crowd of twenty people, and the mosquitoes will bypass every other person in order to suck our blood, which is, apparently, the Dom Perignon of blood. Or, at the very least, a better grade of crack.

However, despite being chewed relentlessly by the buzzy little bloodsuckers, Bug refuses to kill them.

"AAAAAARRRG!! Moooooommm!!! It's biting me!!!" she'll shriek, staring with horror at the insect blissfully sucking away on her arm.

"Then KILL it," I tell her, not inclined to cross the yard to swat a damn mosquito.

"AAAARG!" she replies, waving her arms like a crazy person.

Now not wanting to kill crunchy insects? I get that. I lived in Tucson, where we would occasionally get cockroaches or Palo Verde beetles the size of small cars in the house. And I would empty a whole can of Raid on one of those before I would smash it and hear the sickening crunch of its exoskeleton.

Ladybugs and cute little spiders that wander into our house? I happily transport them to the front door and set them free.

But mosquitoes? Blood-sucking and crunch-free? SMASH.

So it was illuminating, the other evening, when Bug finally shared the reason for her reluctance in bug-killing. She was curled into a chair next to me, wrapped in her fuzzy pink robe and reading "Calvin and Hobbes", when she suddenly said,

"Mom? You know how I won't kill bugs? Here's how I think about it. I think about some giant squeezing all the inside parts out of a person. And I think how that's what I would be doing to that bug. And that would be a horrible way to die, don't you think?"

I had to agree. It would be a horrible way to die.

But it's not going to stop me from killing mosquitoes.