Molting
“Moon Child” by Sarah Louise Wilson
There were warnings all over the tarantula care brochures and websites. A Tarantula on its back is not a dying tarantula! Do not throw away! Still, I wasn’t prepared for Matoaka’s first molt. I knew she’d flip over and lie on her back, but I wasn’t ready for her month of lethargy, the hair loss, or how she stopped eating crickets and moving altogether. Her pink hairs turned a grayish brown, then fell slowly off her back and limbs, leaving an odd bald spot on her wrinkled abdomen and weak, almost naked legs.
The tricky part of molting is that the same signals align with the symptoms of a sick or dying tarantula. The lying upside down is the most obvious part of the process, the final stage before the true molt begins. A dying tarantula will stand upright, legs curling in on themselves until she looks and feels like a small tumbleweed. Before she’s on her back, I worry Matoaka is dying but I try to remember the disturbing urgency of those warning notes. Do not throw your tarantula away!
I vented my worries to a few college friends, complaining about how terrible a mother I was.
“I think she’s dying,” I finished.
“Maybe she’s just depressed,” my roommate's boyfriend, the boy I shouldn’t have been talking to, said in a bored voice.
“Fuck you,” I said, surprising myself.
Depressed humans aren’t always as obvious as a pre-molting tarantula, maybe still moving as much as usual, but slowing down on the inside. Just like the tarantula, though, there may still be subtle signs that something is coming. There may still be a quiet shift in personality, a new slowness or irritability, a mental fog you can’t explain.
She molted on my birthday. I turned nineteen and didn’t feel any older or different, just pissed off that I was sharing my birthday with the same boy I shouldn’t have been looking at. Yet, there I was looking at him as we blew out our candles together. He looked at me, too, when his girlfriend wasn’t looking. Meanwhile, Matoaka transformed over the course of six hours. She shed her limbs, abdomen, everything, and left her old exoskeleton behind. She emerged anew with longer, stronger legs, her hair vibrant pink. While she stretched out limb by limb, I picked up her old skin out of the tank from the tip of a crooked leg. Then, the body dropped from the leg and onto my carpet.
Not knowing what else to do with them, I threw her first molted skin and broken leg in the trash, a stone of guilt my gut. I dropped a cricket in Matoaka’s tank one week later, any sooner and something as small as the touch of a cricket’s leg can still injure the sensitive tarantula even as she re-energizes. Matoaka was ready before the cricket even touched the dirt, and I watched her sink into it with a tinge of jealousy at her hunger.
***
The second time she molted, it took me a while to notice she was in the pre-molting stage. I stood before her tank inspecting it one morning, taking note of the white specks of shit dotting the glass perimeter. A dead cricket lay in the corner. Another one by her fake tree. Her water bowl was not slick at the base, how it normally gets when I forget to refill it for a while, but dry with a dust-like layer of dirt. I tried and failed to remember the last time I’d been to Petsense or even looked at Matoaka. I checked her temperature and humidity levels, thankful that the climate in Milledgeville, Georgia was taking care of my tarantula even if I wasn’t. Layers of webbing carpeted the dirt, another pre-molting signal, as the tarantula is making a sort of bed for her molt. Under her bark cave, atop a fresh layer of webbing, there lied Matoaka on her back, transforming despite my neglect.
This time, I watched the whole process in a trance. She’d barely move for twenty minutes at a time; then a lunge and her legs would bend, a silvery fluid gushing at the joints for flexibility. In the middle of the process, it’s hard to tell where the old Matoaka ends and the new Matoaka begins, as if she were just growing extra legs. Toward the end, it almost looks like she’s embracing herself from behind, then like two tarantulas reaching for each other as Matoaka pushes herself out by the tips of her legs. Finally, when the molt is complete, Old Matoaka folds in on herself. New Matoaka flips back over to lie in the dirt, legs extended out like a star. This time, I saved her molted skin, understanding its importance. I placed it in an old necklace box for safekeeping, to remember how far she’d come.
I was jealous and I knew why this time, twenty-one years old and could’ve killed to peel off my skin if only I had the energy. That’s the amazing part about the molt. Despite the weeks of stillness, or perhaps because of it, the tarantula summons a superstrength to push herself out of old skin, literally peeling the past off her so she can climb out fresh and new. I don’t have this ability. I’ve never broken skin with a blade even when I’ve wanted to. What I do to shed skin faster is pick at my cuticles and litter pointless skin flakes everywhere. I pick, scratch, tear, but the skin below is never brighter or cleaner, and I never feel stronger for it.
I don’t remember details around the day or time Matoaka molted again, but I wrote about her second molt for a creative writing workshop anyway, lying about the setting. I took the story with its foggy details and plopped it before a new backdrop: the night that same boy I shouldn’t have been talking to or looking at took advantage, then left me alone in my bed. I can’t stay here, he had said. I can’t stay here either, I thought. In the false story, when he left, I turned toward my nightstand to find Matoaka molting. I couldn’t move, couldn’t cover up with my fuzzy purple blanket that still smelled like his penis, but I could watch my tarantula and try to summon the strength that she displayed before me. Maybe if I watched her and thought about it hard enough, I’d wake up in new skin and the “me” from that night would just be a corpse to throw away. I’d rise out of my own body, push the carcass on the ground and stand on top of it. I would still be myself, just in a new body that wasn’t traumatized, but resilient.
That night all I really did was lie there and watch the ceiling fan spin, spin, spin, spin. It was the yearning to leave my body that was true. Human bodies are resilient in their own ways, surviving trauma but still sending panic signals just in case, even if we don’t need them. We lose skin cells slowly and unnoticeably, so unnoticeably that I feel like I’m still in the same skin that was stroked by unwelcome hands, the same skin I’ve wanted to kill time and time again. I understand “kill” isn’t exactly the right word, though. I don’t really want to die even when I do want to; What I truly want is to molt and start over. I want to feel the transformation all at once so that I know it to be true. While a tarantula molts overnight, it can take humans years to heal from trauma, years to shed the ways the body and psyche were harmed, if ever.
***
The third time she molted three years later, I was twenty-four and had come to recognize her signs of declination as well as my own. Some of our symptoms even matched: lethargy, lack of appetite, low motivation, dulled appearance. I worried she wouldn’t make it through the night, as it becomes more difficult and life-threatening to molt each time. Molting is necessary to grow, but as the tarantula ages, they can stretch the years between molts.
Months before, I accidentally left her tank open after feeding her. I’d been distracted while packing to move for graduate school, and an hour passed before I got The Feeling: I fucked up. I returned to my room and saw what I already knew had happened: Matoaka escaped.
I ravaged our house looking for her. I checked the cracks between the floorboards, scanned the corners of every closet, searched up and around the fireplace, under the couches and chairs, behind and underneath the refrigerator, among the dirt and leaves of our houseplants. I opened air vents, pushed around furniture then froze in fear that I’d squashed her, crawled around the house like a tarantula for days. She tip-toed on the ground in my nightmares, then dangled from the jaws of my cats, and I’d wake up thinking I’d felt her on my arm. Just when I’d given up, right before leaving that house forever, I lifted an upside-down plant tray in the backyard, and there was Matoaka holding onto it, scrunched up in the sunlight. My relief quickly bubbled into panic when I had to pry her off the tray, legs stuck on like a claw, her body a brittle tumbleweed.
***
I assembled what the online tarantula guides call a “Tarantula ICU,” which is a moist paper towel scrunched up inside a plastic container. The tarantula is to then sit inside, long enough to absorb the water but not long enough to suffocate. If the tarantula’s legs don’t move within a few minutes, an emergency “dunking” must be done. After two minutes of Matoaka looking like her own molted skin balled up in the “ICU,” I filled a bowl of water. Going against all usual instincts, I slowly lowered her into the bowl, not quite submerging her. Five deadly seconds of stillness, then her legs started to bend one by one, almost treading the water.
Instead of beating myself up for almost losing her, I’d been trying my hardest to do what my therapist calls “re-framing the narrative,” and take pride in the way I found her, then saved her. I learned in therapy that negative thoughts are like train tracks deeply ingrained in the brain, and creating new thought patterns can be a way to lay down new tracks, forming an alternate route for the ever-working train of thought. Though the cliche metaphor is easy to understand, it’s harder to follow in practice, and Matoaka’s molt threatened all that mental work. Tarantulas can sometimes harm themselves in their molt, whether it be from low humidity, weakness, or simply bending the wrong way. They can break a limb that won’t grow back unless they molt again, or even die trying to get out of their own stubborn skin. I didn’t watch the molt this time, too afraid that I’d weakened her, but the next morning there was Matoaka, stretching out her new legs, all of them, metallic pink hair shining. Upon a bed of webbing, her old skin lay whole on its back like an offering.
About the Author
Charlotte Lauer received her MFA from Georgia College, where she taught English composition and introduction to creative writing. She currently works at her local public library, and is pursuing a career in K-12 education. Charlotte lives in Milledgeville, Georgia with her wife, four cats, two chihuahuas, and tarantula.
About the artist
Sarah Louise Wilson is an artist based in California. She writes, directs, produces, paints, and acts. In 2010, with her company Stella Bella Productions, she penned and starred in her pseudo-autobiographical romantic comedy “Jelly”, starring Natasha Lyonne (Orange Is the New Black) and Hollywood icon Ed McMahon. The film went on to win four Accolade awards. It has since been released on Netflix, Fancast, Hulu, PBS, and The Sundance Channel. Sarah also has a feature film, No Exit, which won multiple awards and was written up by Esquire, Good Housekeeping, and Variety. She released her debut novel S & M in the Fall of 2020.