Anal Sacks

Now don’t get me wrong, a good portion of the time I see her, I want to kill my mother-in-law, but my husband is quick to point out that our relationship is more than just those times. We do share a lot in common and often appreciate that she can make me laugh. The ways she makes me laugh is usually because (1) she’s either completely misinterpreted something an average person would not, or (2)because she is doing something I cannot imagine most people would do in open public, or admit to doing in open public.

So there we were, sitting on the couch during one of her visits watching one of her all-time favorite shows, the Bachelorette. It was the finale and she was digging Reid, who was dropped the prior week, but she was convinced he would make it back to propose and win the girl. She had been at our house for about a week, figured out our DVR and managed to ‘catch up’ on all of her favorite shows during her visit. You see, I will date myself, but this was the summer that all TVs switched to digital. My mother-in-law was prepared (or at least she thought she was). No one was going to make her purchase regular TV if she had anything to do with it. Hell, she’d boycott watching TV (one of her few personal pleasures that she would not readily admit to) before she’d front some money for it.

I will digress and give some additional perspective: My mother-in-law will not pay for call waiting because it is 35 cents extra a month. She has the cheapest phone plan where you have a limited number of outgoing calls (check it out, you too can get a land line for about $15/month, you just have to beg for it) and does not have long distance on her phone because she purchases phone cards from 7-eleven that she gets for 3 cents a minute. She also tracks, in a notebook, the number of minutes she spends on each phone call, so she knows who she’s spending that long distance money on at a whopping 3 cents a minute (I can get into the 'Even Stevens' at another point in time). She has an answering machine to screen calls (why pay $1.15/month extra for the caller id?) and she will only accept an answering machine that uses tapes, so she can keep them (the hording is another matter saved for another time). She won’t get internet at home, because she can drive to the library and access her account for free for up to 30 minutes and then has even ‘borrowed’ (really stolen) library cards of other unbeknownst citizens to use their computer minutes while she is there if she needs more (‘They all have computers at home and shouldn’t have left their cards. Anyway, they’re free cards, they can get another one!’). So asking her to take advantage of a $99/month combo package is akin to asking her to slit her wrists and give up. Further, she won’t even pay for a stamp to mail in her bills, she takes them in, in person, to pay them. So here you are looking at going from a $15-20/month cost to $99(plus tax). Hey, if they want to sit in the dark all night so they can one day pay for one of their grandson’s pizza habit in college, go for it I say.

So the switch to digital TV arrives. Yes, they do have a TV that was manufactured after my husband’s birth, but I am not sure that it was a purchase made this decade. Further, she has thoroughly researched (by way of borrowing Consumer Reports from the library) all the digital boxes and has sent away for her coupons. Because they will only allow two per household, she determines the cheapest and most effective way to make the purchase and they have 2 boxes ready to go for the switch. Well the switch comes and goes, she can’t seem to instruct my father-in-law well enough to be able for him to get these boxes to work, so they are forgoing TV for the time being. Why doesn’t she return the boxes? Because she can’t get the money back for the coupon (just any additional costs she paid) and that’s blasphemy to essentially ‘give’ back the box to the store. Remember this is the same woman who sends her 70 year old husband to the roof to fix the Antenna when they don't get certain channels well enough with the rabit ears.

Anyway, I digress. We are sitting on the couch, and she has made a ‘bet’ with me that it’s Reid, and I have my money on Ed. When my mother-in-law thinks she has a sure thing, she is willing to put her money where her mouth is, BUT IS STILL CHEAP, so she usually puts a ‘burger’ on it (her version of a beer, I presume). I also presume that this burger, if she is buying, is from a McDonald’s Dollar menu. If she isn’t the one buying, she might be willing to take an upgrade. Well Oliver, our 90 pound 5 year old Weimaraner who thinks that he is a cat, snuggles up between us on the couch. My mother-in-law doesn’t really like dogs in the house and believes they are ‘for mousing,’(an Indiana term for 'what purpose a pet serves') so she is already not so happy he’s resting his back and hind quarters against her thigh, but he is a sweet dog and curled into a ball, so the accepts it. About an hour into the show he starts licking himself pretty good in the nether regions. He is a male, although he’s a eunuch and doesn’t have as much need or space to clean down there, he was managing quite fine. All of a sudden a potent odor comes from the space he was licking. He then climbs down and starts ‘cleaning’ a little better, even taking whatever he left behind on the leather couch (thank god we got the leather couch too as it is actually clean-able!). My mother-in-law, who is ‘smell sensitive’ and has a very difficult time managing to change her grandchildren’s diapers because she cannot stand the smell starts roaring with disgust, rolling back and forth on her seat on the couch(imagine, if you will a waddle whilst seated), trying to determine how important it is for her to get away from the dog verses having to give up her spot for her show. I simply explained to her that Oliver had probably chosen that time to depress is anal sacks and the smell (which was both potent and equally disgusting) was the result. She then decides to take my pillows to create a barricade between her and former ‘dog spot’ so she doesn’t have to move off the couch. I was quick to point out that the couch is clean-able; the pillows, not so much. So she gets up and what is revealed is Oliver had been using her as leverage for his anal sack depression onto the couch (which he did not leave, but cleaned up afterwards), but due to the night lighting and warm dog, it was difficult to see (or feel) until we were all off the couch. So she asks me again about the ‘anal sacks’ and what I was talking about. She had owned a dog on and off for most of her married life, and I assumed at one point it would’ve come up so I started explaining it to her: that sometimes vets do it them, some dogs do it to themselves or the owners will do it. During this time, while explaining to her the process, I had been busily finding cleansers and Febreeze to dull the stench. My mother-in-law is still on the couch with a hanky in one hand, covering her nose, and the other hand is waving in the air, attempting to move the smell away from her.

And she responds in her loud and ratchety voice, ‘What? Anal Sex? Who would do that to the dog?’ At this point, the chuckles I had over having to clean the stench has progressed to tears, laughing so hard I am about to wet my pants, hardly able to come up with a way to respond. She is staring at me, attempting the kind of laugh you have when you realize someone else thinks something is funny and you aren’t sure you got the joke. She continues that she still doesn’t understand what anal sex has to do with the smell. I almost have a scream it out, explaining I had said ‘anal SACKS,’ not ‘anal SEX.’ Realizing her own misintepretation, she joined me in my fit of hilarity, tears and all.