Weird but Normal

by Mia Mercado

  Luckily, we found this little-known wedding planning helper. It’s called Google—ever heard of it? There are many things I don’t understand how people did pre-internet: travel across the country, travel to other countries, plan a vacation, pay their taxes, figure out what they’re going to eat for dinner or how to renew their driver’s license or what Macaulay Culkin looks like today. Wedding planning sans internet would have either been an expensive nightmare or a weird house party in a church basement.

  We also asked married friends and family their advice in the process of planning a wedding. We got a lot of “The marriage is what’s the most important, not the wedding.” That is nice and sweet and thoughtful but provided no real guidance as to how the fuck to decide which venue was right or which DJ seemed like they wouldn’t play “Cupid Shuffle” on repeat.

  Here is the one piece of advice I wish I’d been given: make a list of the things that are important to the two of you. Make another list of the things that are actually important to the people you love who are attending the wedding. I knew my dad would be bummed if we didn’t do some sort of father-daughter dance, despite how weird and yucky and borderline “take these goats for my daughter” they can seem. However, I knew no one in my family would be like, “Hmm, I noticed you didn’t do a garter toss, and your Uncle Steve was really looking forward to catching the lingerie you’d be wearing around your thigh all night.”

  Aside from that, do whatever the fuck you want. Want your wedding party to be immediate family only as to avoid weird conversations with distant friends? Go for it. You want to ban anyone from playing the “Chicken Dance” or any R. Kelly? You are free to do that as well. Want to make everyone stand and applaud when you enter the reception? They’re going to do that anyway, so get ready.

  We wanted our wedding to be fun. So we did the things we knew would make us happy, make our guests comfortable, and not make us completely broke or lose our minds. I think we did all three successfully. (There was the part during the reception where my sister and I drunkenly revived a dance we choreographed. So maybe we didn’t fully do the second thing.)

  At the time I’m writing this, Riley and I are coming up on our one-year anniversary. I’m not sure if the first anniversary is “paper” or “cotton” or “taco dip” or “panties.” I know eating the top tier of your wedding cake you saved in the freezer is a thing, but we will not be doing that. Partly because that sounds freezer burn-y. But mostly because we got big-ass sheet cakes from Costco that I drunkenly finished off the second we got home the night of our wedding.

  I’m still getting used to saying I’m someone’s wife. Turns out, I don’t really know how to do that either. If you’re looking for marriage or relationship advice, I have neither. A lot of people have a lot of thoughts, feelings, advice books, and religious cults on how to have a good marriage. To likely no one’s surprise, ours has involved a lot of talking, listening, laughing, crying, patience, grace with each other, grace with ourselves, and pooping with the door open. Your mileage may vary.

  Whatever you choose to do wedding-wise, I hope you end your big day feeling loved and in love, full of food and beverages and gratitude. I ended mine completely naked in my bathroom, barfing up cake and wine. It was perfect.

  The Holy Sacrament of Birth Control

  Let us begin by making the sign of the cross, as praying you don’t get pregnant is one of the few forms of birth control readily accessible to everyone. Receiving the sacrament of birth control is an exciting time in a person’s life. You should feel proud, honored even. You’re about to join a select part of the population anointed with hormone-suppressing oils, baptized in period-altering waters.

  I see you’ve chosen the path of the intrauterine device, Mother IUD. I also see you’ve previously prayed to the Patron Saints of the Pill: Loestrin, Yaz, Mircette, and Yasmin. Like the troop of high school mean girls their names make them out to be, they may have led you into temptation: making your tits look amazing, giving you skin that had never been clearer, lightening the flow of your period a noticeable amount. You took them like your daily bread.

  Then, came the plagues of Depression and Anxiety and Really Weird Poops. So goes the verse: Love is patient, love is kind. Love is taking the pill every day even though it fucked you right up. For you so loved your only uterus and the freedom of family planning that you gave yourself weight gain, mood swings, nausea, inconsistent periods, and an underlying sense of dread.

  I want you to know that you are not alone. At least in the metaphorical sense. Unfortunately, the men you lie with will not be expected to put their bodies through such torture.

  When you visit your gynecologist to receive your IUD, you will begin with the traditional greeting: “Forgive me, Doctor, for I have sinned. It has been three Tinder dates since my last visit.” You will note that your last confession involved divulging that you had “an itchy vag,” the biblical curse for sleeping with the second hottest guy in a local improv troupe. The best-case scenario, you confessed, was the itching was caused by a PH imbalance in your vagina, brought on by the Plan B you recently took.

  Your unholy union with improv fuckboy involved the standard hymnal (him playing guitar at you for an uninterrupted forty-five minutes). He doused you with the liturgical sprinkling of his back sweat. You directed him to “please open your bedside table to page Condom” as today’s service did not include you being on birth control. He was guided by some higher force to respond, “I’ll pull out,” which didn’t match the words in your missalette.

  Though you walked through the valley of his shadowy shared apartment, you feared no STIs: for you made his ass send you pictures of his latest screening. You prayed his timing while pulling out was better than when he played that Sufjan song.

  When the ceremony ended, you dressed, genuflecting to collect your underwear from the floor. You made the pilgrimage to the sexual health section of CVS, like so many before you have. After a brief, private counsel with Youth Minister Google, you decided it was best to buy the name-brand version though it would be more expensive.

  By the grace of Plan B, during your last confession, your gynecologist reassured you your test results were pure, absolving you of any lasting sin.

  In preparation for the sacrament of the IUD, you will be expected to don the ceremonial garb: a medical gown and that weird, tiny half-sheet you never remember how to properly put on. You will pray you figure out how to wear the robe so both your boobs and your entire butt are covered but accessible if necessary, how to display the little blanket so your crotch is hidden but not wrapped up like a human burrito.

  While you wait for your room’s parishioners to return (the doctor, the nurse, in some cases an exorcist), you will find it is a good time to reflect. To take in the blessing of not worrying about getting pregnant. To mourn the passing of that terrible and specific smell of sex and latex, the one that christened your ex-boyfriend’s roommate’s futon so many years ago. To give thanks for that time in Target when you unexpectedly ran into a coworker and she didn’t notice the box of pregnancy tests in your basket. The latter, nothing short of a miracle.

  Do not let your faith falter, even when you hear the nurse practitioner in the hallway chanting, “Hey Abby, is the nonhormonal IUD the copper one or the other one?” You will not ask why your room has an Anne Geddes Baby Ladybug doll sitting on the windowsill, like some sort of watchful mutant Christ-child. You will grant forgiveness to the pamphlets for other birth control methods which use cutesy marketing copy like “BREAK UP with your birth control. DEFINE THE RELATIONSHIP with your ovaries.” You will prepare your body to receive the sacrament, putting your legs in the stirrups and your vagina in full view.

  Then they will bring forth the gifts: a speculum, the ceremonial gel, and, finally, the IUD. Your doctor will ask the question for which you have been preparing, “Who gives this woman in marriage to this IUD?” To which you will respond, “I do.”

  “This is the thing that goes in your body
,” she will say, holding the IUD up eucharistically. Though it is a scary-looking, T-shaped contraption, you will respond, “Amen.”

  “This thing may affect your blood,” she will continue, saying things like “heavier flow” and “worse cramps.” You will swallow your fear and say, “Amen.”

  Your knees will part and the angel of a doctor will say, “You may feel a little pinch.” Your body may writhe, your insides constricting, as though the devil is moving through you. In time, it will subside, I promise. And then, it will be over.

  When you leave the room, you may feel terrible or not any different at all. You may wonder why people make such a big deal about this thing. I mean, “hallowed” and “hollowed” sound so similar. But this is an initiation into a new chapter in your life, a sacrament of self-love.

  You may consummate the marriage by reaching inside yourself to see if you can feel the strings. You may fear you are alone, noticing that in your most troublesome times, there is only one set of footsteps in the sand. Yes, those are your own footsteps because you did not need to carry a child you were not ready for. You walk alone, and you are at peace.

  As you continue on your journey, may you be blessed with heating pads and comfy blankets when the period cramps shake you to your core. Remember, you can do all things through alcohol, which numbs the emotional pain but supposedly makes those cramps worse. Let us end by praying, O Birth Control Gods, that the men we lie with don’t sneakily take off their condoms, a thing that apparently some think is an okay thing to do. That is sacrilegious and extremely fucked up.

  In the name of the pill, the patch, and the IUD, Amen.

  Part 5

  On Being Human

  These are stories about our inward-facing selves. Who we are at our core, what we feel, what we think. They are about the things that make us cry and laugh and scream. They’re about why we think the way we do even when we want to be like, “Nah, I don’t think like that.” They’re about the weird things we have to do to prove we’re human to ourselves, to each other, to robots online. They’re about the gross and real, strange yet standard, weird but ultimately normal parts of being a whole entire person.

  Learning How to Not Shit Myself

  Everybody has a shit story. That is true and a fact or at least a hill I am fully committed to dying on. I’ve bought property on this hill. I spend my weekends there, waving my flag and proudly belting the song of my people. Except the hill is just a big ol’ turd mound, the flag is a pair of my own shit-stained underwear, and the song is a series of symphonic fart noises I make with my mouth like braaaawmp thlrrrrpt. Oh, I’m sorry—was that a wince of disgust I detected? Did that description become a little too visually arresting? Do you find poop talk gross and immature and not what you paid money to read? Well, Hon, maybe you need to grow up a little.

  We’re all adults here. And as adults, I think we can all admit to having one good story about pooping our pants when we were definitely too old to be doing so. Or at least a time in which we had an alarming close call. If you do not have a personal, pants-shitting tale in your storytelling arsenal, I regret to inform you that you are not yet an adult. I don’t care what you know about mortgages and good Crock-Pot recipes or how many children and Roth IRAs you have. You become an adult when you poop your pants, and those are the rules.

  I have shit myself once. The experience, in three words/short phrases: Lowe’s, paint aisle, uneventful. It happened more recently than I should probably admit in print, but oh well, here we are. My butt was ready for something the rest of my body wasn’t, and that’s really the end of that. If you’re going to sit there and tell me that worse things haven’t happened in the paint aisle of a Lowe’s home improvement and hardware store, sorry but you’re wrong. That, however, is not The Shit Story™. That experience occurred in the summer of 1999.

  I was eight, which is young in terms of coming-of-age moments, but wise beyond my years in terms of not pooping my pants. My dad and I were on a final tour of the home our family would soon be moving into. It’s a ranch-style home in suburban Wisconsin where I spent the majority of my childhood and where my parents still live. The exterior is this orange-yellow-red brick that kind of looks like when you mix ketchup, mayo, and mustard together—the official color of the Midwest. The interior has all the parts you’d expect a home to have: a kitchen part, a living room part, a few bedrooms, and a couple bathrooms. It’s unassuming and cozy and, now, a little bit cramped when all six members of my family are back in it together.

  About halfway through the tour—of this single-story, ranch-style home—I felt a feeling. It was a stomach feeling and not a happy stomach feeling like love butterflies or that feeling you get when you’re about to eat really good pad thai. (Not that those two feelings are mutually exclusive. I’ve been spiritually moved by pad thai before.)

  I felt that universal stomach feeling known to humankind as: I am about to shit my pants.

  Again, this was not a large house and this was not our first or second or probably even third time going through it. We’d seen it in all its suburban, ranch-style glory, and my dad had just come to finalize a few details. This tour could not have been more than fifteen minutes long—twenty if we’re being generous with how long my dad may have talked about crown molding. But in the moment, my body had no concept of time.

  I’ve never been an outspoken person, but I was especially quiet when I was a kid. In fifth grade, I started a presentation on space exploration by standing at the front of the classroom, staring at my trifold board completely silent for a solid minute until my teacher was like, “Well, are you gonna tell us about the astronaut chimps or what?” So I’m sure I didn’t openly announce to my dad and the previous homeowner, who was giving the tour, that I needed to use the bathroom ASAP. I’m guessing that I, instead, spent a minute or five too long continuing to saunter around the house, nodding quietly like, “Ah, yes, I can tell this is new carpet, Harold. That is the only thing I am thinking about right now and absolutely nothing else. Like, for example, how the entire insides of my body might come out of my butt at any moment. I mean—oh, wow, Harold, this carpet.”

  Thankfully, I eventually must have mustered up enough courage to excuse myself from our three-person tour group. I left to unleash my demons in the privacy of what was still technically some stranger’s bathroom. My friends, sex is great but have you ever thought you were about to poop your pants and then made it to the toilet on time? The relief—emotionally, psychologically, physically—is poetic.

  However, what happened next must have been poetic justice for some shit-related crime I had committed in another life: there was no toilet paper.

  I panic-waddled around the bathroom, looking like a shameful penguin with my pants at my ankles. I quietly but quickly opened cabinets and drawers, hoping to find a spare roll, some tissue, maybe a towel no one would miss. But my search left me with only dental floss and a plastic baggie.

  The floss seemed far too tedious, and wiping my ass with a Ziploc bag sounded like a humiliating thing to have to explain to a doctor after inevitably slicing my asshole on one of the sharp top corners.

  So, I did what anyone would do in that situation: I wiped my butt with my underwear.

  If you’ve never found yourself in a situation where you’ve needed to fashion toilet paper out of miscellaneous bathroom objects, like some kind of disgusting MacGyver, let me tell you: it is amazing what the human spirit is capable of in times of distress. I used my underwear like flower-patterned cloth toilet paper, which is extremely foul . . . but also kind of fancy? When have you ever wiped your butt with a floral-patterned cotton cloth? How posh! How chic! Do you think that’s what the Queen uses to wipe?

  I finished doing that nasty, bad, bad deed as best I was able, threw my underwear away, and kept living my life as normally as I could.

  Ha ha, just kidding! I didn’t do that because hell hath no end and there was no trash can in the bathroom. It was just me, my underwear, and whateve
r remained of my eight-year-old dignity. (Side note: Why did the previous homeowner’s top packing priorities include toilet paper and a garbage can? Aren’t those the literal last things you’d want to remove from your home??? The items missing from the bathroom felt prescient in way that attacked me personally.) Fortunately, I did have enough of a grasp of the situation to know that flushing my underwear down the toilet would be more of a problem than a solution. However, that still left me with evidence to dispose of and no proper trash receptacle in sight.

  So I did what anyone would do in that situation: Put my makeshift underwear toilet paper into the aforementioned Ziploc baggie, shoved the baggie into my pants, smoothed out my pants, and pulled my shirt over the lumpy area as to not give away what terrible secrets lay beneath. Then I left the bathroom, hoping no one would stand too closely or breathe too deeply near me. That dental floss is probably still in the back of the bathroom cabinet, forever changed by the afternoon, as was I.

  I probably should have won an award for Being the Most Chill and Nonchalant While Taking a House Tour with Shit-Stained Underwear Shoved Inside a Baggie Inside My Pants. Not to be an advertisement for Ziploc, but that double-lock seal is no joke: nobody smelled a thing. At least, nobody gave any indication that they smelled a thing. Maybe that previous homeowner is somewhere writing a story called, “Learning How to Ignore an Eight-Year-Old Who Definitely Shit Herself.”

  The three of us continued our tour outside, my plastic sandwich-turned-underwear-trash bag still in tow. As my dad and the homeowner were deep in conversation about who knows what—I, as you might imagine, was a little too preoccupied to keep track of anything other than my underwear—I saw a beacon of hope in the form of a woodpile. And yes, my friends, I did what anyone would do in that situation: I secretly hid the baggie with the poop panties underneath the pile of firewood.