The Miracle Of Life Is Gross (And There's Something Wrong With My Taint)

“Honey, there’s something wrong with my taint!” I yell to my husband.

“Your what?”

“My taint. How have you lived to be 39 without…oh, never mind. It’s called the taint because it ain’t the vagina and it ain’t the butt… It’s my perineum, if you must know. There’s something wrong with it. I can feel this bump and it stings like a motherfucker but I can’t see it so I don’t know what it is.”

“Maybe it’s a hemorrhoid?” he suggests. “Have you been straining a lot?”

“Oh, maybe. I mean, this baby has definitely gummed up the works down there. Would you recognize a hemorrhoid if you saw one?”

“I might, but I’m not sure I want to recognize one on you.”

I guess I can understand him not wanting to get up close and personal with my roid-ridden taint, yet this is the same man who races to the bathroom to hold my hair back every time the morning sickness strikes, which to me is much more disgusting. I’m always trying to yell “get away!” but he can’t hear me through the retching and so he just rides that vomit train into the station. Sweet and horrible.

So anyway, my husband, after declining my invitation to play amateur proctologist, hands me a tube of Preparation H and leaves me to it. The mystery bump feels better almost immediately, so I think his diagnosis is correct, which may save me the embarrassment of having to bring this up at my next OB appointment.

When I first met my husband five years ago in a dark, sultry bar, I never imagined I would one day be begging him to examine my pregnancy hemorrhoids. This is what pregnancy does to a woman. The mystery is, as they say, gone. It left town when I started peeing with the door wide open. I know, I know, but if I didn’t, we’d literally never be able to finish a conversation. That’s how often I pee while pregnant.

Also, I pee when I sneeze, and since I’m allergic to dust and equally allergic to cleaning, let’s just say I’m sneezing and peeing all over this joint. I’m the poorly trained puppy my husband never asked for.

Don’t even get me started on the gas. I could power a motorboat right now. I could burp the alphabet backwards. If you stuck a pin in my belly (but please don’t), I’d fly across the room like a cartoon balloon.

The miracle of life is just so gross sometimes.

Of course, none of this compares to the inevitable “Stay up here by my head or you’ll be blinded for life!” panic in the delivery room. Pooping on the table, crowning, episiotomies–you can’t unsee that stuff.

There should be an emotional epidural for the significant others, to promote post-pregnancy amnesia. I think maybe this exists already, and doctors are secretly administering it, or no one would ever have sex again after the first child, and every family would have only one kid.

Thank goodness for science.

Related post: 10 Things You Can’t Do In Public While Pregnant (But Totally Want To)