I have tasted fear.

It tasted a little like a breakfast burrito backing up on me but that’s not the point.

The point is that everyone has felt fear but I’m not sure mine count as real, medically recognized phobias.

For instance, I feel sweaty pricks of panic every time I let my daughter get in the car with a teenage boy.

And I am overcome with cold, clammy anxiety until the moment I open her cell phone bill, at which point I sink to the ground, overcome by nausea.

But I don’t have a fear with a name, like the fear of spiders (arachnophobia) that my daughter has. When she sees an eight-legged creature in her bathtub, she screams, “Mom! Come quick! Get the spider.”

I come running and then she says, “Don’t hurt it!”

The reason I am not afraid of spiders is because I could squash them like, well, bugs. See, I am lots bigger than the majority of spiders, though some of those Amazonian ones I’ve seen on the Discovery Channel — the ones that look like they could be saddled and ridden to herd cattle— might give me a run for my money.

I figure that even if the spider is sitting in the bathtub, three or four legs raised in a threatening manner, shouting, “You want a piece of me?” I can say, “Yeah,” and pull off one of its legs.

Instead, I’ll put the spider in a jar and release it in the yard where it can go home to its spider wife and children and say, “You should have seen it. I had her right where I wanted her.”

Even spiders deserve to maintain some dignity.

Shannon’s fear of spiders does not keep her from functioning as a normal teen, although she avoids horror movies involving spiders, going into our garage, and cleaning the Skittles-encrusted corners of her bedroom (though I suspect this last one is due to perspirophobia, or fear of doing actual sweating).

Some people, though, have fears that are downright debilitating.

How, for instance, do you marry or hold a job when you have a fear of chins (geniophobia)? When you have a baby, do you cover his chin in little blue bandages? Are all the framed photos in the house of faces from the nose up?

Other fears that might prevent someone from living normally include: fear of knees (genuphobia), fear of gravity (barophobia) and fear of oneself (autophobia).