You know it’s love when you are willing to pull each other’s hair out of the drains and you don’t totally want to hurl. We have that kind of love. There was proof early on of his love for me and it has continued all these years. It was always in a gross but obvious sort of way.

The first time was when he carried my dead cat Ralph to the box that he was to be transported in to the pet cremation place. Ralph had to be transported and cremated because he thought it was illegal to bury an animal in the back yard. Before, I would’ve just dug a hole, but I had this odd new desire to be law abiding. Something about knowing he would carry my dead cat made me suddenly want to do the right thing. It had to be love.

So naturally, we got married. And with marriage comes babies. Or, in our case, our first miscarriage. We got pregnant about 3 months after we got married and had an early, but long and drawn out miscarriage. It was about 6 months after the miscarriage that I “passed” something that looked like an alien into the toilet. He put on some yellow cleaning gloves and fished it out of the toilet to take into the doctor’s office with us. He touched our little alien child. Well, it ended up just being a really large blood clot, but still, he touched it. I knew he loved me and would be such a great father to my children some day.

A couple of years into the marriage we went for sushi with my longest friend Pat. Pat and I finished everyone’s saki and then moved on to another continent and drank several Margaritas and tequila shots. We were so lucky that the apartment we lived in had two toilets close enough that he was able to hold my hair back at the same time as my friend’s. There seemed to be nothing more charming than seeing my man show me that he also cared about my friends.

He has always been good at holding my hair back when needed, but was a real champion the time that I had food poisoning from something I ate at Hamburger Mary’s. It was after having a few kids and let’s just say that when you don’t practice your Kegels regularly after giving birth a few times, it makes food poisoning a multi-bodily function kind of event. And that man of mine stood there at the kitchen sink holding my hair back while I was uncontrollably peeing on his feet. After all these years, he still loved me.

There was that one time though, when our third child was born. We had a water birth with the two of us in a bathtub. I was submerged up to my belly button and his feet were dangling in from the side so he could be as near to me as possible without being in my way. The midwife caught Abigail and handed the freshly born child to him to place on my tummy. She was wrapped in a clean white towel. Well, clean except for the little schmear of poop. I waited until it was just the three of us lying in the bed at the birth center to whisper to him, “I think I pooped in the bathtub.” The man went running to scrub off his feet in the hottest water possible. Apparently even our love has some limits.

After 11 plus years of marriage, I still know how much he loves me. I hope he knows that even though I get freaked out when he has any bodily functions, I always have and I always will be willing to pull out the clump of our intertwined hair from the shower drain.