A Pain in My...You Don't Want to Know

There is no shortage of tell-it-like-it-is pregnancy books out there. You know what I mean, the tongue in cheek books that rant about barfing behind trees on morning walks or about throwing out all your cute Jimmy Choo pumps because your feet permanently swell to a new size. And, there is certainly a market out there filled with books about babyhood, postpartum depression and toddlerhood.

What we're missing is a book that tells us the truth about what really happens to US, the mommy, the woman in the trenches, permanently after the baby. I'm not talking about six months later; I'm talking about forever later. Once in a while, you get a glimpse, a one-liner about needing to buy new bras because the ones you wore before pregnancy never seem to fit right again. But, there are things your pregnancy books never seem to tell you that you might wish you'd known before going into this whole business.

You know that if you manage to escape pregnancy without a dingleberry (aka: hemorrhoid), you aren't going to escape labor without one. Here's what I didn't know: once the path for one's been forged in your nether regions, it's got a memory and it comes back. Not all the time mind you, but on occasion, just often enough to make you ticked off and to be totally grossed out and irritated. I wonder, why, if I can't remember the way to the zoo without a map, which I go to at least twice a year, how can this thing find it's way back to the same darn spot?

Yeah, the pregnancy books joke about these precocious little things like they are a minor irritation akin to the ever-rolling elastic waistband on maternity jeans. They use that keepin' it real voice to at least warn you about them, but they don't keep it real enough to bother telling you that now that you've had one, much like your little bundle of joy, you've got them for life. Of course, most likely, you'll get them once in a blue moon; but that's beside the point.

Didn't you do enough for this labor and delivery process by carrying the child, pushing it out of your body and nursing it? I think asking you to sport an itchy, swollen appendage as a reminder of those uncomfortable days is a bit much.

Anyway, as you can tell, I'm in the throes of one of these nifty guys these days. I am boycotting it as best as I can with the help of what I learned at the hospital after I gave birth: Tucks pads, Cortaid and Nupricainal. My son finds these items immensely amusing in the bathroom because as we all know, something else books seem to leave out is that you cannot go to the bathroom yourself when you have a toddler and all objects lined up on the floor near the toilet are clearly there for their amusement.

This is Collin, fleeing from the bathroom with tubes of cream in each hand; not that you can see the cream, as he is of course, uncooperative with photography. He's 17 months old; what do you expect?