Free Mother, Can You Not? by Kate Siegel

veer off script:
    “Are you headed back to Princeton tomorrow? We’re driving up to New York, so we’d be happy to give you a ride. Princeton’s on the way! It’d be easy!”
    It would not be easy. In fact, if he accepted my mother’s offer, we would need to cancel our flight and stay overnight. That aside, what on earth would I talk to this man about for a full four hours? I had nothing left! I blew my entire résumé in this conversation! Even worse, what would my
mother
say? As he tilted his head, I saw my entire high school career flash before my eyes, my chance at Princeton slipping away in this tacky hotel lobby. Curse you, Mother, you greedy, greedy beast. I held my breath.
    “That’s very kind of you, but I have a rental car.” Thank God for Avis.
    The whole encounter was maybe five minutes long, but my mother maintains to this day that this conversation was the reason I got into Princeton.
    All things considered, I got off easy. If this were a Teeny Tiny Tim story, Tim and Ethel would haveslashed Mr. Bowman’s rental car tires in the night and embarked on a fabulous road trip from Virginia to Princeton, during which Tim would write a Tony-nominated play, discover a cure for cancer, and also get a handwritten letter of acceptance to Princeton’s class of 2011.
    ----
    * 1 Mrs. Bowman’s voice sounded suspiciously similar to Mrs. Carpenheimer’s.
    * 2 That movie actually starred Julie Rabinowitz.



Dr. Who (Ha)
    M y mother is the human version of WebMD. It’s actually impressive. After talking to her for five minutes, you’ll be convinced that even the smallest ailment is cancer or the black lung. “Oh, you have a zit? Well, I read a study that adult-onset acne can be a sign of polycystic ovarian disease—when was the last time you went to the gyno?” If I have a sore throat and make the mistake of mentioning it to my mother. “KATE, YOU COULD HAVE MENINGITIS!! TOUCH YOUR CHIN TO YOUR NECK!! DID YOU TRY IT? CAN YOU TOUCH YOUR CHIN TO YOUR NECK?!” Throw a few swollen glands in the mix, and you’re definitely looking at Ebola.
    Although where perceived illnesses are concerned, there is nowhere my mom’s hypervigilance is more ferocious or disgusting than sexually transmitted diseases. The number of times she has shown me vileimages of pus-filled genital warts and infected herpes sores is easily in the thousands. In high school it got to the point where I could have legitimately worked as an STD diagnostician. I could spot pubic lice in my sleep.
    Between my headgear and the dancing crabs in my dreams, birth control and STD prevention weren’t really things that needed to be discussed while I was in high school, but during the summer before my first year of college, my mom decided it was time for me to get fitted for a diaphragm.
    I will never understand why my mother’s preferred method of birth control was (and still is), of all things, the diaphragm.
You know what would make all this steamy sex we’re having even hotter? A spermicidal-gel-reapplication break! Bust out that preloaded vagina jelly stick and get over here, sexy.
    She scheduled an appointment with a New York–based gynecologist before school started, so I would have a “lady bits” doctor close to campus.
    “You need to be prepared, Kate. You’re gorgeous; those horny college boys are going to be all over you.FRESH MEAT! Mind you, this isn’t the all-clear to start humping every guy on campus the second you get to school…”
    In light of the chorus line of genital warts I imagined prancing around under the boxers of every man I saw, humping frat guys was not at the top of my college to-do list. That said, I had yet to French-kiss a boy, and I was extraordinarily sexually frustrated. It was getting to the point where I would catch myself fantasizing about dry humping strangers in the street after making brief eye contact. Oh, if the Westwood Subway sandwich chef only knew the things I imagined doing with him on top of the