Free Mother, Can You Not? by Kate Siegel Page A

vegetarian-topping trays.
    It was a confusing time, so I’ll admit, getting birth control was probably wise. Besides, all the television shows and movies I’d watched suggested that college was a sexy time of experimentation and freedom, even for late bloomers like me.
    We arrived in New York a few weeks before classes started to shop for dorm accessories and visit my aunt on the Upper West Side. On the afternoon of thedoctor’s appointment, after hours of arguing about hampers in a nightmarishly vast Bed Bath & Beyond in Manhattan, we made our way over to my new gyno’s office.
    Of course my mother insisted on staying in the exam room with me, and we waited together for the doctor. I was crinkling my paper gown nervously, my legs dangling over the edge, firmly closed. My mom gestured toward the stirrups.
    “What’re you waiting for? Spread ’em!”
    “No!”
    “Oh, come on! What’re you, shy all of a sudden?”
    The examination room was lit with unflattering fluorescent panels that simultaneously made my acne and budding frown lines more pronounced. I worried that in this light my cobweb-dusted vagina was not being set up for a good first impression with Dr. Weiner. A disembodied model of the female pelvis was resting on the counter of the cabinet-and-sink unit to my right. The three-dimensional anatomical sculpture was spliced down the middle, exposing the intricacies of a healthy female reproductive system. To me, it wasjust a blank canvas on which to paint the horrors of sexually transmitted diseases. I named her Gonorrhea Gloria and was in the midst of imagining a particularly gruesome genital warts outbreak on the model’s cervix when Dr. Sabrina Weiner walked into the room.
    “Hi, Kate! Nice to meet you! What brings you in today?” She looked about forty, and she was wearing a cream blouse and high-waisted blue pants that were more “fashion girl” cool than “mom jeans” frumpy. A smart white lab coat, with her name embroidered in navy, pulled the ensemble together nicely. This intimidatingly chic woman just renewed my concern about my vagina coming off poorly. Can a lady get some mood lighting up in here? Honestly, she looked nice enough, but it’s hard to get excited about someone when you know that the plan is for her to insert foreign objects into your vaginal canal. My mother chimed in on my behalf.
    “Hi, Dr. Weiner! So, Kate will be starting college—PRINCETON—in a few weeks, so we wanted to get her fitted for a diaphragm and talk to you about sex.”
    I blushed about the fact that my mother felt theneed to scream “Princeton” everywhere she went since the day I had gotten in to the school.
    “Princeton! How impressive! Well, you have a very responsible mom, Kate. Are you sexually active?”
    “Nope, not a man in sight.” my mother responded enthusiastically.
    “No. Not yet,” I confirmed.
    “All right, can I have you swing your legs up onto the table and scootch your bottom all the way down to the edge and put your feet in the stirrups?”
    I complied, pulling at the paper gown as I placed my legs into a spread-eagle position.
Here we go, vagina, time to sparkle, baby!
    “Perfect. All right, honey, so I’m just going to do a basic exam here, and take a few measurements to get you fitted for this diaphragm. And we can talk about other birth control options as well.”
    Dr. Weiner removed her wedding ring, placing it on top of Gonorrhea Gloria, and applied plastic gloves. She smiled at me reassuringly and sat down on the little rolling stool between my legs, lifting up the thin waxy gown and revealing my vagina to the room. Shedidn’t recoil, so that was good, but I could feel Gloria judging the shit out of me.
    “Okay, so you’re going to feel some pressure.” She inserted a finger, and I squirmed uncomfortably. “No, no, don’t clench, honey. Try and just relax. Breathe.”
    My mother was completely uninterested in the fact that a stranger’s gloved finger was halfway up