Fungus Among Us
Life's unsightly parts—failures, awkward moments, and messy relationships—fertile ground for our most substantial growth. We're resilient, weird when examined too close, and occasionally psychedelic.
** Names have been changed to protect those who haven't yet developed the ability to laugh at themselves. We're working on it.
While in marriage survival mode, I went knee deep into reconnecting with my husband. And by knee deep, I'm talking deep throat and waist deep; an obscene amount.
My body went into hyper-drive like male dogs pissing everywhere. My secretions were marking my territory. But after a month of heavy hitting, I started bleeding during sex and post coital. Weird at first, and then utterly alarming when it looked like an actual crime scene. The irony of this savagery was that it was foreshadowing the obliteration of my marriage. Massacred, just like our bloody sheets—a Dexter episode where the victim was my dignity.
Mid thrust, I look down at my now ex-husband and ask, "Please tell me you used protection when banging your mistress."
(I would switch back and forth between girlfriend and mistress just to be flip, like I was ordering different flavors of betrayal at an infidelity ice cream shop.)
To which he replied, "No!" with such venom. "She's married and a really good girl. We both wanted to feel each other. And she's not my mistress. I am in love with her and we connected on a very deep and intimate level. Like we've known each other from another life. You wouldn't understand. Our love is different."
Side note to cheating spouses: This kind of honesty literally slices someone to their very core. You've been cut so deeply and feel so numb that anger cannot penetrate the surface. Utterly paralyzed and in complete disbelief and horror, you actually start to try and understand the bullshit, like Stockholm syndrome for the emotionally decimated.
"Huh? I don't need the fucking backstory." (I'm still straddling him, an absurd tableau of marriage counseling gone horribly wrong.) "I just wanted to know if I should get tested for STDs. But that's really amazing about your connection. It seems otherworldly. Suuuuuper happy for you and Pickle."
I say this with a smirk that has started to develop a permanent feature upon my face. Like it's helping me shield all the bullshit—my face's very own emotional hazmat suit.
Side note 2: Pickle is a nickname I've developed for Omar’s mistress, a descendant of an elite Turkish family who attended the best primary and Ivy League schools and currently, makes pickles, thus reducing her to a brined vegetable. Voldemort comes to mind. She, who will not be named, for fear of her vinegary self to appear and steal your soul; in my case, my husband. I could have gone with "Cucumber" or "Zucchini," but those sounded too phallic, and she was already handling enough of that department.
Is this really happening?
Is this my life?
Am I being rhetorical?
(Yes, yes, and obviously.)
Truly trying to understand my husband and his "real connection" with another woman, I'm bewildered by his absence in real life and willingness to incinerate the perceived life we had been building for the past 16 years—a Viking funeral for our marriage where I'm somehow still alive on the burning ship.
"Don't call her that. You're acting like a kid. Stop living your story," he says in a grandfatherly tone protecting his true love's honor, as if he's suddenly the mature one in this scenario where his penis is still literally inside me.
"Fine. Back to my initial question; so no to protection. Good girl status safeguards against STDs. That seems correct. It's possible I remember hearing that in sex ed but the main one was condoms. Wait, what about that cream you keep rubbing all over your stuff?" I quip dismounting and straddling his thighs while investigating the situation. "Oh my god, how long have you had those bumps? Are they super itchy? Are they pussing? What other symptoms are you experiencing?" Now I'm really getting in there, almost burying my face in his man-junk area, the CSI: Genital Unit detective nobody asked for.
Side note 3: I have a strange love for dermatological issues. Specifically when it's in the form of a pimple. There is an incessant need for me to perform open surgery. I need to pop it and allow the ooze to be released and extract the root. Weirdo tendencies. But after the release, then the world is a better place. So too, is my need to get at the bottom of all this shit. Give it a name, identify the source; erecting a monolith engraved with the date and cause of death—a tombstone that reads: "Here lies our marriage, killed by pickle juice."
The pustule is just a symptom of the problem, but gives me great pleasure when seeing it in its fully engorged form. My compulsion to extract the foreign puss could stem from my need to be perfect. It also strokes my need for instant gratification not unlike online shopping; a quick fix to a focused source of stress. Our once porcelain skin equating to our marriage and our entire perfect image of a family blotched by zits. I have allowed my marriage to slip and become tarnished. Like a chipped diamond or zirconium, pimples are unacceptable thus urging my psychosis to purge and scrape clean. I've never seen a pimple 'down there.' Maybe on an ass…I think I had one on my ass. I'm not really sure if I'm ready to see a dick pimple. But this act of extraction gives me some sense of control over this unwelcomed invasion, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of my marriage.
"Get off of me Meghan, you're being crazy," Omar shrieked. "It's just a rash. I think it's jock itch or something. It's been like this since December. There's no puss!"
"Since December? It's March. Something's up. And let's hope for the both of us it's curable. Have you seen a doctor?" I say this as my next logical explanation enters my unstable mind. HIV. I must have the hīv. (This is one word sounded out with a short i, like I'm attempting to make a terminal illness sound cute.)
"You're insane and I think you'd really love it if I gave you an STD," he utters almost accusatory, as if an itchy souvenir from his affair would somehow be my preferred parting gift.
"Come on, no one wants gonorrhea or the clap. Seriously, who wants a clappy vag? That's just gross but it would be quite funny in a sort of strike-me-down-once-more-with-your-rod-of-fury kind of way." This rolls off my tongue as I secretly agree with him that I want an STD to disprove this fucking good girl nonsense. She was herpes central station in my mind, a transit hub of venereal misfortune.
Post-straddle, I book an appointment with both my gynecologist and Planned Parenthood because really, I should be doubly certain. Maybe the free one has better detectors for vagina diseases because they NEED to be certain. Plus fuck those clinic protesters. I enjoy taunting these assholes like it's an Olympic sport and I'm going for gold.
As I walk up the tree-lined street to the clinic, I focus on the anti-abortion zealots mirroring the amount of foliage that dots the entrance. "I'm getting another one of those annoying fetuses removed," I'll casually say to a woman clinging to a sign with a photo of a dead baby. She hadn't been there to rescue this poor aborted child on her unsettling poster so now she was doing her part to embarrass and harass women to prove that dead babies are shameful.
At once, an anti-abortion campaign composes inside my mind; Sarah McLachlan is the obvious choice for the mournful soundtrack only because of those sad ASPCA ads rescuing animals from the clutches of death highlighting skillfully spliced grave images intertwining PlanB with Satan's plan. "In the arms of the angel, fly away from here... and into my uterus," plays softly in the background.
"Unless, just thinking off the cuff here, let's raise this baby together." I'm now looking at the protester square in her round, judgey eyes. "You and me, co-parents. Listen, we don't have to live together but realistically, kids are expensive. Public schools are so pedestrian here in the Bay Area, no?
Let's talk financial logistics."
The sign-bearing woman backs slowly away from me without losing my eyes. Crazy understands crazy. She then drops my focus at a safe distance and sets aim on a new victim to direct her pro-choice rhetoric. Don't puss out. Stay with me lady! I'm ready to have a real conversation about how we keep this baby... and whether we should name it Pickle Junior.
After a smattering of tests and 2 full weeks of anticipatory waiting, the results are back. And it's not good. I'm fucking clean. Jesus, I actually wanted to have an STD to hold over that pickle poking ex-husband of mine. I really am an asshole. So Omar just has jock itch or some other fungal infection. Still, that means Pickle has fungal pussy. This makes me smile. But that smile is interrupted with the idea that now my vagina has the ability to produce mushrooms... I could start a boutique truffle farm between my legs.
My doctor tells me my cervix is just getting used to massive amounts of sex. Uterus training is quite rigorous and my husband’s penis is throwing big punches to toughen up my walls. Scrappy, hometown, Rocky Balboa lady parts gearing up to take down the Russian. Or in my case, a Turk. Cue Eye of the Tiger. "Rising up, back on the street... Did my time, took my chances..." My vagina, the underdog story no one asked for.
Full circle, Omar has cleared his rash and my vag is ready to take on heavyweights, however, our daughter has developed a similar rash on her face. Obviously, I think we are responsible for the indirect transmission of our pseudo-STD. Thankfully we have extra cream from the junk treatment that I apply directly onto her cheek.
Needless to say, it cleared up in two weeks—the rash, not my marriage. That stayed thoroughly destroyed.
