I was at Costco today, stacking $511.29 (actual figure) worth of crap onto the conveyer belt when my husband, who was kind enough to endure the excursion with me and also load and unload the haul several times—from shelf to cart to belt to truck to house—stepped on my foot.

I’ll say here that I have extremely large (nearly size 11) feet, so they get stepped on a lot. But when somebody flattens several of your toes in the mother of all megastores, you’d sort of like an apology.

“You okay, big foot?” my husband laughed over his shoulder, not even breaking his loading-stride.

I hrumphed.

When he was done unloading, he wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “How’s your toe?”

“It wants an apology,” I told him.

“I apologized fifteen times!” he exclaimed. “I just asked you how it was again. What do you want from me?”

“An apology,” I told him.

“Well, technically you stepped underneath me,” he informed me. “In basketball, that would be a foul on you.”

We actually were having this conversation. I swear on thirty-six rolls of toilet paper and a trough of salsa.

“Well that’s the most fucked-up thing I have ever heard,” I replied. “Why wouldn’t I just run around the court stomping on people’s feet and calling FOUL then?”

“Because that’s not how you play the game,” he said.

We were laughing by this point and I really wasn’t even mad anymore, because I realized that in his mind, he had apologized to me. Not with actual words—clearly that’s not his thing and never will be—but with his concern. And then I wondered about the eleventy jillion times I’d stewed silently for days because I was waiting for this man that I love to say he was fucking sorry for something. Maybe, just maybe, he’d “said” it but I just hadn’t heard him.

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize that. Sorry.”

At least one of us can say it.

*not my actual foot as mine are too ugly to share, but you get the idea

Being tan never came easy for me. Oh, no. I had to work at it, people.

And work at it I did. My childhood winters were wiled away on unlimited-months-at-a-time sessions at Sunsations Tanning; summers were spent slathering my pasty-ass skin with iodine-laced baby oil and “laying out” on metallic mattresses. Never mind the fact that that shit got scary-fucking-hot and also I was wasting countless hours of my life obsessing about whether or not my towel was at the exactly-perfect-angle to ensure even bronzing. There was the cause to consider. In my adolescent book–the one with George Hamilton on the cover–you couldn’t be too rich, too thin or too gloriously, gorgeously tan.

Eventually I saw the errors of my ways. And by “errors of my ways” I mean miles of saggy, splotchy, wrinkly skin staring back at me in the mirror. After seeing pictures of my face through a photodamage camera (my eyes! they can never unsee it!) I swung hard the other way and became a Sunblock Nazi. Now I put it on head to toe every single day, even in the winter. I chase my kids around the house with it while extolling the virtues of pristine, cancer-free skin. I carry that crap in my purse, okay? I. Am. Reformed.

Except I still like to be tan. Not in that hilariously-horrible There’s Something About Mary way, but definitely in the Dancing with the Stars way. So I sometimes occasionally often spend a small fortune on self-tanning cream and usually I feel pretty good about the results. Sure, it smells like sewage and I can’t reach my back so there’s always a big milky bulls-eye in the middle of it and my ankles frequently look like I’ve been dancing in Dorito dust, but from a distance it’s passable. Plus, a fake-tan hides a lot of sins.

So then my friend Barb suggested we get spray tans. It won’t be bad, she said. We can stand buck naked in front of a total stranger and let her bathe our saggy bodies in a cloud of toxic orange chemicals together, she said! It might even be fun.

I don’t know about you, but my idea of fun rarely has this in the middle of it: “Can you lift your boobs any higher? No? Well then maybe bend forward a little. Maybe a little more. Oh, never mind.”

When the nice lady was done airbrushing parts of my body my gynecologist has never seen, I looked in the mirror. Already I had a nice little tan line. I swooned at the sight of me.

I drove home, ridiculously pleased with myself.

Then I undressed. Huh, that’s funny, I thought as I inspected my backside. That little t-bar where my paper panties were looks awfully high. In fact, it sort of looks like it’s halfway up my back. But that can’t be. Because if it were, you’d see it when I put on my bikini.

So I put on my bikini to check.

Nobody will notice, right?

*Please note, my bikini bottom is not tugged down in that picture for comedic purposes. That is where it sits. I‘m thinking of bedazzling the T and just going with it, or maybe adding some eyes so it looks like a cool Southwestern skull tattoo. What do you think?

“I asked dad how you make a baby, but he said you’d be mad at him if he told me,” my nine year old announced matter-of-factly the other night.

I honestly didn’t even know where to start with that one. (But for the record, I’d have given him three blowjobs in a row to take that one for the team.)

“Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t have been mad at him…” I started. I wasn’t trying to deflect. Sure, I’d been dreading this conversation (is that bad?) but I certainly wasn’t going to avoid it. After all, my kids told me all the time that I was the “coolest mom they knew” and that they “could talk to me about anything”. I could say the words penis and vagina without giggling. I was almost positive.

“What do you already know about making babies?” I asked her, wondering if I’d have to start by undoing a bunch of playground damage.

“I know there’s a mommy seed and a daddy seed but I have no idea how they make a baby,” she told me. The poor kid looked incredibly sad about this.

I gave her a hug.

“Okay, so it’s like this: The mommy seed lives inside her tummy, and the daddy seed lives inside… well… inside him. When they decide they want to have a baby, the daddy plants his seed in the mommy and the two parts come together to make a baby.”

To self: Nailed it!

Sort of confused face. “But how does the daddy seed GET to the mommy seed?”

“Oh. That.” It’s just a word. You can say it. “The penis.”

Horrified look.

“What about the penis?”

“His seed comes out of his penis.”

“And goes where?”

To self: You were given this information once and it did not in fact kill you. She can handle it. Just spit it out and get it over with.

“The daddy puts his penis inside the mommy’s vagina so the two seeds can come together.”

Honest-to-god-I-might-vomit-expression-complete-with-holding-her-gut-and-cringing-posture.

“But… why?” she demanded.

“That’s just the way it works,” I explained. “It’s kind of a weird system when you think about it, huh?”

She nodded like a bobblehead with ADHD.

“How long does the penis have to stay in there?” she wanted to know.

“Not that long,” I told her, because she was starting to look worried and also because, well, it’s true.

“I don’t want to do that,” she said, again clutching her tiny middle.

“Then you don’t have to,” I told her.

She didn’t ask if it hurt. She didn’t seem to make the connection that her dad and I had obviously done that at least twice. She didn’t ask what happened if the penis accidentally fell into the vagina when you weren’t trying to make a baby. So all in all, I’d say that was a pretty successful chat.

On a totally unrelated note, this all happened on the same night I broke my no-wine-on-weeknights rule.

Crazy, right?

One of my favorite websites, Betty Confidential, asked me if I would be willing to be interviewed by my husband Joe (who is affectionately skewered immortalized in many of my books). I said why the hell not? I’ve got nothing to hide. Then I threatened Joe with castration if he made me look bad. So here you go!

JOE: I couldn’t help noticing that the title of your last book says “the sex-obsessed, not-so-handy man you married,” not the one you—Jenna McCarthy—married. That wasn’t an accident, right?

JENNA: Of course not, honey. You know as well as I do that you’re only one of those things.

JOE: I am pretty handy, aren’t I?

JENNA: I don’t call you MacGyver for nothing!

JOE: Are you sort of hoping people will think that’s you on the cover? Not because her/your head is in the oven, but those are some sweet legs.

JENNA: So what are you saying? Those Photoshopped, stock-photography legs are more attractive than my legs? The legs that carried the body that carried your children? That’s really nice.

JOE: O-kay, moving on. Of all of the millions of things that I do to annoy you—and I know there are millions because you detail them frequently and you also wrote a 300 page book about them—is there any one in particular that is slightly more annoying than the rest?

JENNA: Wow, tough question! I’d have to say of all of the many, many maddening things you do, that get-to-the-point hand gesture you make when I’m talking is the worst.

JOE: Yeah, sorry about that. But you have to admit you do talk a lot, and sometimes I start falling into a coma in the middle of one of your stories. I’m mostly just doing that to stay awake. But I still love you.

JENNA: Gee, thanks.

JOE: No problem. So you’ve said in interviews that writing this book has made you even happier in our marriage. What do you mean by that?

JENNA: You sound a little defensive, dear. Look, I always knew I scored when I married you, but honestly, until you hear stories of what other women are living with on a daily basis—from back hair-ripping to nipple flicking to the guy who goes postal when his wife steps on the bath mat with wet feet—you don’t always remember to count your blessings. I mean, sure you’re annoying, but now I realize it could be much, much worse. Plus you’ve seen me naked and you still love me and tell me I’m hot, so I’m thinking I am pretty lucky.

JOE: What are your wildest fantasies—

JENNA: Really? You‘re trying to turn this interview into Penthouse Forum?

JOE: I was trying to ask you, what are your wildest fantasies for this book?

JENNA: Oh, right. Sorry. Let’s see, that it sells ten million copies and then they spin it into a sitcom starring Kristen Wiig as me and Ryan Reynolds as you—well he’s a little young so either him or the guy who plays Phil Dunphy on Modern Family, not that you’re a dork but you still kind of remind me of him—and then I write the sequel and the sitcom sweeps the Emmys and we live happily ever after. Not that I’ve given it much thought.

JOE: I’m writing the rebuttal book. Any title suggestions?

JENNA: How about: What Were You Thinking? Living With and Loving the Diet Coke-Addicted, Shoe-Obsessed, Never-Stops-Talking Woman You Married?

JOE: Wow, you’re good.

JENNA: Thanks. I try.

Check out the original interview at BettyConfidential!