We all carry around baggage from our past relationships, and one particularly heavy piece of luggage I’ve been lugging around for a while is full of goodies such as “I don’t want to be abandoned”, “will you really be there for me when you say you will”, and “can I rely on you.” Which sucks for P. because he certainly has never added anything into that particular piece of luggage.

Earlier today, I had an IUD inserted. I had heard that there might be a bit of discomfort and I might be a little crampy and want a ride home. He said he would take me. Now, he didn’t really have to take me. I could managed on my own. But deep down, I was kind of a scared baby about the whole thing and really wanted him to be there. Things have been crazy busy for him at work lately and last night, he worked until after 2am. So, I told him that if things were too busy at work, I could just go by myself.

He looked at me like I was an insane person. “Of course I’m going to take you.”

The actual procedure? I had read about “discomfort”. I heard maybe I should take an “advil” beforehand. No one mentioned that this would hurt worse than any pain I had ever experienced in my life including the time I broke my nose skiing and was three hours from the nearest hospital or yesterday when I had to get a third shot right in my elbow that went all the way to the bone. My doctor was trying to distract me with happy talk but my brain could not process the noises I was hearing because it was stuck on only the excruciating pain in parts that were protesting with every fiber and cell. “What is this coming at us? The uterus is not meant to have plastic pokey things invade the sacred walls. Back pokey thing, back! We will fight you to the death!”

A couple of minutes into it, my doctor said, “are you OK? Should we take a break?” A break? Are you serious? Finish whatever the hell torture you’re doing and get all that heavy equipment out of there! Actually, I said, “it’s OK. Keep going.” And muffled a sob.

When it was all finished (which took less than five minutes but seemed like several years), she told me that I’d done great. That this went really smoothly, compared to many she’s done. I had no words to reply to that.

Now that I’m home, I’ve done more reading. According to the Mirena brochure, a side effect may be: “cramps dizziness, or faintness when Mirena is inserted. This is common. Sometimes the cramping is severe.” This is like saying, that side effects of chopping off your head with an axe may include a slight pinch in the neck area. Although, if you read between the lines, you realize that cramps that cause you to FAINT are severe indeed. And then I read on an online forum about someone’s experience. “The procedure was very very painful…I’ve never cried out in pain before and this procedure caused me to yell and press my fist up to the wall for support! As soon as the doctor passed my cervix I fainted and puked, and then hyperventilated and my body curled up in a VERY tense little ball. I had to lay on my side and work on my breathing until my body finally untensed about 20 minutes later.”

And hey, I didn’t pass out, puke, and hyperventilate, so maybe I did OK after all.

I did manage to hold back tears until I saw P. in the waiting room. And while the worst of the pains had passed, the cramps were still pretty bad. He looked concerned. “What can I do?” There’s just nothing much a guy can do about cramps, sadly.

We shared the elevator with a guy, a couple of women, and a toddler. One of the women was pregnant. The guy was asking one of the women about an online forum she goes to. “Oh, you know. We hang out. Talk. Complain. Brag about our kids. Oh no, I’m pregnant! That kind of thing.” As we got off the elevator, P. leaned over and whispered, “should I ask her the name of the forum, so you have somewhere to talk to people this afternoon?”

We got home, and helped me to the couch, made sure I was tucked into a blanket and had the remote. He asked if I needed a book, a movie, a drink. He said that he would only be five minutes away at work and to call if I needed anything or for him to come home and make me lunch. I curled up into a little ball and he rubbed my back. I told him that I was sorry I was being a whiny baby, but he said that today, I could be as whiny as I wanted. (Not that I’m not anyway, but I suppose he’s used to it.) He brought me my laptop and my phone.

He finally took one last worried look at me and headed down stairs. A couple of minutes later, I heard him coming back up. He was carrying a cat. He put the cat next to me. You likely haven’t met my cats. They are possibly the laziest cats I’ve ever known. This one was quite happy to curl up and fall right asleep. (And he still is, several hours later.)

P.’s been sending me text messages all afternoon. “How’s your loins?” It’s his romantic side coming out. Now I’m just waiting for him to get home so we can do some tequila shots. I could use some about now. And you can’t get much more romantic than tequila shots.

I may have excruciating pain in my most personal of places that’s making me wonder if my uterus has secretly been plotting against me all this time, just waiting for the chance to decimate me, but my luggage is getting a little lighter.

I grew up thinking that my parents, and particularly my mom, were always right all the time. It never really occurred to me to question them. Even as I got older and grew exceedingly frustrated and wept and wailed that they never let me have any fun and snuck into the living room late at night while they were sleeping and watched Miami Vice in the dark, scrunched up next to the TV so I could hear the sound that I had turned down to “please do not wake up my parents” levels, I still assumed that they were right. I thought my mom had a direct line to God, so I believed the litany of behaviors she claimed to be ungodly. I did many of these behaviors anyway, but deep down, I expected God to smite me down at any moment. (Turns out, God is too busy to cast lightning upon you for watching Don Johnson abuse fashion.)

After therapy and years of living my own life and realizing that things are not always as my mom told me and did I mention the therapy?, I have come to the conclusion that my mom, is in fact, not always right. Or, to be more specific I don’t know if she’s ever had a right thought in her entire life. To be honest, she’s a bit of a loon. A total raving mad lunatic, not to lump anyone with emotional troubles in with her, because I wouldn’t lump anyone in with her particular brand of crazy.

It’s liberating, really, realizing that I don’t have to live my entire life based on her bat-shit insane philosophies. But now that I’ve gotten past the big stuff: maybe the sole purpose of women in life isn’t to make a happy home for their husbands, and maybe having sex with someone you aren’t going to marry doesn’t bond you with them forever and make you follow and love them no matter what, I’m beginning to question everything she taught me.

Take last night. I was ironing some shirts. And I started thinking: what if I’m ironing them all wrong? I’m doing it the way she did it, and Lord knows “the way she did it” is mostly not the way anyone should do anything. I had this total loss of ironing faith, all because my mom told me that KISS worshipped the devil only later I read Gene Simmons’ autobiography and discovered that he just pretended to worship the devil to sell more albums and the illusion that my mom could tell devil worshippers on sight was shattered.

You may not think devil worshipping and ironing are related, but then you didn’t grow up in the crazy land of my life. I do know this. As refreshing as it is to not do things because my mom said to, it will be even better when I do things without even considering what my mom’s views on them might be. Because ironing is tedious enough without questioning your subconscious motives and hidden childhood issues.

Do you ever feel like your life is an elaborate ruse and everyone is going along with anything you say, even though behind your back, they have weekly group therapy sessions to talk about how you are obviously so unhinged that it’s best to humor you because who knows what might happen if your illusion of reality is shattered?

And do you think that the Lowe’s guy and the Home Depot guy would really agree to meet and hang out at all, even at a therapy session to discuss how to keep the ruse alive? It’s the only explanation though. The alternative is that these people truly think the things that P. and I say are normal, reasonable, and not at all cause to prescribe us drugs and monitor us carefully.

What I mean to say is that I have discovered that home ownership consists of saying completely outrageous things to strangers, and having them respond with thoughtful nods of their heads. Perhaps the employees of your larger home improvement chains have simply become accustomed to the crazed ideas of the new home owner. They’ve learned that it’s better to just agree with whatever the customers say and load them up with power tools and spackle, because why the hell not. It’s not like the employees will have to clean up the mess once the homeowner has gaping holes in exterior walls that let in not only spiders, but also opossums and small deer. They’ll just get to sell more spackle.

This was an actual conversation I had yesterday with an employee of a better-known paint store. It’s a place that claims it wants you to ask them things. They know things. They’ll tell you these things they know and you will become wise and handy.

“So, we have orange peel texture on our walls. And we’re scraping it all off and then sanding it, and then skim coating the drywall with joint compound. Then we’re going to sand it again and then paint and prime it. All 3200 square feet.”

Paint guy’s response: thoughtful nod as though this is a perfectly reasonable task undertaken by millions of people daily.

“Do you see any issues with this? Anything we should know about?”

Paint guy: “That should work fine. Just use a roller with a quarter-inch nap.”

I was tempted to keep going: And after that I’m going to bake a cheesecake that’s entirely fat-free but tastes better than Alton Brown’s. Sound reasonable? And then I’m going to try this Tour de France thing I keep hearing about and win myself a yellow jersey.

I think all this thoughtful nodding is making us a little too confident. Last night, we were looking over our day’s work, deciding what our next step should be. We have this hallway with a door right in the middle of it. You open the door and there’s just more hallway. It’s the lamest door in the history of doors. All the other doors in the house mock it while we’re sleeping.

“Look at lame-ass door over there. No room of his very own. All he’s good for is blocking the hallway. Hey dumbass! When’s the last time anyone closed you? Oh right. Never. Because you’re in the middle of a freakin’ hallway. ”

It’s embarrassing, really. We figured the best thing to do would be to just quietly relocate the door to a better home. Like the recycling bin.

So, P. and I were discussing taking out the molding or door jam or whatever the hell it’s called and then cutting out the six inches or so of wall on either side of the doorway so we had one continuous hall. And then we noticed that the wall before the doorway and the wall after the doorway didn’t line up. Huh. Well, that make things a little trickier. What the hell is the wall doing being all crooked like that?

P. went out to the garage. And came back with a hammer. Have I mentioned that he had a glass of wine in the other hand? He got ready to start pounding holes in the wall. Have I mentioned that he was on his third glass?

I wondered what the friendly Home Depot employees would have to say.

“So, we want to know why the wall on this side of the doorway is thicker than the other side. So, we’ve had a few glasses of wine and we’ve got our hammer. We’re going to just bash in the wall a little and see what’s behind it. Does that sound about right?”

Thoughtful nod.

P. looked at me. He took a sip of wine, raised the hammer.

“Maybe I shouldn’t smash big holes in the wall right now. Maybe we should figure out something tomorrow.”

I gave him a thoughtful nod.