December 12, 2024
Quick! Your toddler is being swarmed by a thousand angry bees. What’s the first thing you think of?
If your brain is broken in the specific way mine is (and it’s probably not), you thought about the television show 9-1-1. Created by the prolific Ryan Murphy, it’s a procedural drama about first responders in Los Angeles. It’s one of the worst shows I've ever seen, and I’ve seen all eight seasons. Twice. Because I’m obsessed with it.
Some things that have happened on 9-1-1: A tsunami hits the Santa Monica Pier. Angela Bassett and Peter Krause go on a cruise that’s attacked by a cartel, before sailing into a tropical storm and capsizing in a Poseidon-inspired plot arc. Hackers take down the electrical grid, which unlocks all the cages at the zoo. Jennifer Love Hewitt kills a guy but he’s her abusive ex so it’s fine. A large piece of metal rebar impales one of the paramedics through the skull; he is back at work two episodes later.
But in the eighth season of 9-1-1, the almighty Ryan Murphy gave us the beenado. Basically: a truck carrying a ton of bees crashes and the angry bees form a bee tornado, terrorizing Los Angeles and almost bringing down a commercial flight on which Angela Bassett is a passenger. The pilots are incapacitated but don’t worry, she successfully lands the plane with the help of a child who likes to play flight simulators on his VR headset. I love this shit!!
And so while my toddler was being attacked by bees – or what I thought were bees, but actually turned out to be yellow jackets – I had the fleeting thought that Ryan Murphy’s beenado foreshadowed all this.
My son just turned 3. He has a little best friend at daycare named Gordon. He doesn’t tell us much about what he does at school all day, but the little information we can get out of him usually involves Gordon. I’d run into Gordon’s mom a few times at dropoff and she seemed cool, so I decided I’d try to set up a playdate. But this was not without its complications.
I have lifelong social anxiety. I spent many years working through it, only for all my progress to come undone during the Covid lockdown. Then I started working from home. Then I had two kids. Put simply: I haven’t spent a lot of time around other adults who aren’t my husband since early 2020. And I’ve always been more at ease on the computer anyway. The prospect of asking another adult, “Wanna hang out?” instills a physical reaction in me that’s indistinguishable from how I felt the time I got mugged.
So there was much hemming and hawing with my therapist as I tried to work up the courage to make the first overture. She asked me, “What’s the worst that could happen?” Truthfully, I didn’t know. My kid could run into traffic, I guess? Gordon’s mom tells me she thinks vaccines have microchips in them? And it’s California, so a massive earthquake is never completely out of the question. I never even considered bees. They were not on my extensive mental checklist of potential threats.
Eventually I got over it. I told Gordon’s mom we should set up a playdate sometime, and then left our contact info in Gordon’s cubby. She texted me and we planned to meet three Sundays later, at the park down the road with the duck pond. “I better pack a change of clothes,” I thought, “Just in case he falls in the duck pond.” He’s never even come close to falling in the duck pond, but I was determined to be prepared for anything.
The morning of the playdate, my husband decided to stay home with our then three-month-old baby. “I just know she’s gonna bring Gordon’s dad,” I thought to myself. Admittedly it did sound more convenient to leave the baby at home, but I was anxious and irate that I might have to make conversation with TWO adults by MYSELF. The horror! And sure enough, when they got to the park I could see that Gordon was accompanied by both his parents. But then my son and Gordon saw each other and got so excited, and I remembered what the day was about. It wasn’t about me or my anxieties. It was about making sure my kid has friends so he turns out normal instead of becoming a serial arsonist.
My kid and Gordon started playing, and it was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Gordon’s a pretty adventurous kid, and he runs much faster than you’d expect from a three year old. My kid is a little more cautious. He only recently started enjoying the slides at the playground, for example. So it was a lot of Gordon running and my kid chasing Gordon, with the parents straggling behind. We crisscrossed the park. Nobody fell in the pond. Conversation flowed smoothly; it turns out both boys enjoy the same terrible YouTube show about cars, for example, so we complained about that for awhile.
I was talking to Gordon’s dad about our jobs when Gordon took off, running up an embankment behind the tennis courts, with my kid following dutifully behind. I had described myself as a writer and Gordon’s dad asked me, “What do you write?” which is a reasonable question, but I was racking my brain for some answer other than, “Actually, I mostly think about writing,” when I looked up to see my kid. He was frozen completely and whimpering a little. There was a bee on him.
“Hey buddy, it’s okay,” I called out to him as I approached. I heard buzzing. There were three bees on his jacket. Then suddenly, there were a dozen bees on his jacket. A bee on his face, hanging from his upper lip by its stinger. He started crying louder now, still frozen in place. I ran towards him and reached into the swarm of bees that was now rapidly increasing in size. “This is just like Ryan Murphy’s beenado,” I thought, bees buzzing around my ears as I grabbed my son under the arms. Bees flew up the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I heard screaming. After a few moments, I realized the screaming was coming from me.
We ran past the tennis courts, covered in bees. The ones inside my sweatshirt were stinging me. There was still one hanging from his face. I threw my backpack on the ground and tried to rip off my sweatshirt, but my shirt came up too, displaying my disgusting milk-stained nursing bra to the tennis players as I accidentally flung my glasses into a bush. I started trying to rip off my kid’s clothes. I got his pants off and found a bee in them. I didn’t see Gordon or his parents anywhere.
“HELP ME!” I screamed, “WE ARE BEING ATTACKED BY BEES!” The tennis players largely ignored me, except for one guy who helpfully suggested that I run away. “WE ARE RUNNING,” I screamed at him, “THEY ARE INSIDE OUR CLOTHES!” He shrugged and turned back around to serve the ball.
Gordon’s parents reappeared and his mom sprung to action. She helped me get the rest of my son’s clothes off. She asked if either of us was allergic to bees. A woman wandered over from the tennis court to offer us a first aid kit and the key to the park bathroom. Once inside, Gordon’s mom put wet paper towels on the back of my son’s neck and mine, because we were both hyperventilating. Gordon’s dad collected my backpack and sweatshirt from the ground, and my glasses from the bush.
I unzipped my backpack and a bee flew out.
Gordon’s mom made sure none of the bees left stingers in us before helping us get dressed and escorting us back to the car, where she gave me a huge hug and said, “We’re trauma bonded for life now,” as I started crying again. I loaded my son into his car seat and drove off.
After a minute or two of silence he asked, “Why we go home? Where’s Gordon?”
In the end, it could have been worse. My son and I both got stung four times each. Did you know the average person can survive 10 bee stings per pound of body weight? I know this now, because I Googled it when I got home, after I sat in the empty car in our garage and cried for awhile.
It turns out they probably weren’t even bees. They were yellow jackets. Yellow jackets look like bees, but they’re actually wasps, and wasps are assholes. They’re especially mean in the fall, when they start to starve to death. They build nests underground. My kid likely stepped on a nest of hangry wasps.
Kids are resilient. I’m so proud of my son. He took it mostly in stride, and probably handled it better than I did. Occasionally a fly gets in the house and he yells, “GET OUT OF HERE BEE!” One night at bedtime he told me his tummy felt funny and then suggested, “Maybe a bee got in there.” We recently held his third birthday party at the park where it happened, though we steered clear of the tennis courts and the embankment behind them.
And that’s pretty much it. A terrible thing happened to us and we survived.
The moral of the story? Don’t obsess over all the ways things could go wrong. The worst-case scenario is something so bizarre it’ll probably never occur to you until it happens. And in a way, isn’t that beautiful?
Also I have at least one thing in common with the incomparable Angela Bassett now. We've both survived a beenado.
If you liked this post, you can sign up to receive updates when I publish new writing. Thank you for reading!