A little late, but happy Mother's Day to any members that are mothers.  I posted about my own mother last year, but I don't mind repeating how my mother helped me overcome my fear of snakes.  I was 5 and I mistook a rough green snake for some sort of green rope hanging on the side of a tree in my backyard, and I touched it trying to figure out what it was.   My cousin (6) screamed "Snake!"   and I screamed, too.  The only snake I had ever seen was a close-up picture of a  rattlesnake striking at the camera(in our animal encyclopedia) and even though I never saw the green snake's head, I assumed it  also had big fangs!
  Anyway, the snake shot up the tree,and my cousin and I ran inside, screaming and crying.   When my mother heard that we'd seen a green snake, she told us that it wasn't dangerous, but I was still crying, so then my mother(who later taught 5th grade) did this imitation of the green snake crying to his mother: (in a squeaky voice)"...and one of these big boys had big brown eyes, and the other one blue eyes!"  and she kept on until we started laughing...
  She took me to the library, got me a card, and helped me check out reptile books.  A year later my dad helped me catch a garter snake(which later escaped and my 2 yr. old brother stomped its head)  I started first grade as the 'snake boy' and went up to the 5th graders to talk about my snakes.  My mother bought me a baby (cayman) alligator for getting straight 'A's ( in 1963 we were clueless and we kept it in a shoebox!   before it died weeks later!)
   My dad died when I was 9.  2 yrs later, a little musk turtle he had caught for me died and my mother cried with me.  She never remarried, but finished college and taught school.  When I was 12 my ringneck snake escaped and crawled into the TV(the cowardly repairman made my mother remove its crispy little body) and mother asked a carpenter at our church to build me an escape-proof snake cage.