Don't Bee Afraid

Aaron Sharp | August 20, 2020

This post originally appeared August 20, 2017 as one of my A Sharp Life columns in the Odessa American newspaper. It appears here by permission of the newspaper. The text appears largely as it originally did 3 years ago, but I have taken the liberty of adding a few visual aids and clarifying comments.

One of the oddities of dealing with small children is learning to navigate and deal with different aversions. Often these aversions revolve around food, but there are plenty of occasions when a child has an aversion to something without any sort of culinary tie in. It can be an aversion to a particular piece of clothing, a show on the television, or just about anything. If they were an adult their reactions to these seemingly innocuous things would result in counseling, being placed in an institution, or possibly a career in Congress. They are not adults, however, so you are forced to deal with these dislikes in a way that hopefully helps the child learn something, and doesn’t cause you to have an aneurism in the process.

I am thinking about this today because our adorable four-year-old Ballerina seems to have quite an aversion to bees. Now, to be clear, she is not the only child with an aversion in our family. The six-year-old Zoologist is somehow under the impression that children can die from having their nails trimmed, and the two-year-old Fashionista has an aversion to doing anything she does not want to do. Still, the Ballerina’s obsession with her dislike for bees has reached a different level.

Multiple times a week she reminds everyone in earshot about her intense abhorrence of bees. Her hatred of bees is so pronounced that she also intensely dislikes flies as well, on the off chance that they are bees in disguise, or perhaps are in league with bees in some way. The funny thing is I am not sure that she has ever actually seen a real bee in her life.

This brings us to this last week when the wonder woman started going through old clothes and such to see what could be added to a local consignment sale. As we were getting ready the next morning the Ballerina saw it—the bumblebee costume she had worn for Halloween when she was five months old. There were tears, many, many tears. It was a tragedy that in time historians will somberly mention in the same breath as names like Hindenburg and Titanic. It was not until her mother promised, with as much earnestness as she could possibly muster before her morning cup of coffee, that the costume would definitely be sold in a consignment sale. Finally, the angst of the Ballerina was satisfied. The Wonder Woman and I made a pact that if the costume did not sell it would never darken the door of our home again.

Now, as long as she never sees a bee for the rest of her life things ought to go just fine.

Can’t you feel the cuteness on this? She could not.