New Year, New Vagina

Confession: There are just some things that even we seasoned moms can't handle with grace.

Happy New Year friends! I hope that you are into the full swing of things again after all of the holiday aftermath. Perhaps you've made some resolutions? Perhaps you've even stuck with them through the first full week of the new year. If so, bravo! One of my resolutions for the new year, was to get caught up on all of my sorely neglected medical stuff. I made a dentist appointment. As I promised a fellow blogger, I made a dermatologist appointment. And on only the second full day of the new year, I hauled my bootie in for my annual GYN exam.

For most of us, going to the gynecologist rivals the joys in life we treasure such as root canal and unmedicated child birth. But still we trudge in year after year (or at least I hope that you do)to do our (other) womanly duties. And even in the face of everything that we moms handle on any given day, from juggling jobs and juniors, changing diapers to changing the world, we still get intimidated by a simple visit to the gynecologist.

Tell me that you didn't, at your last visit, follow the same pre-exam rituals that woman everywhere engage in. It starts with the painstaking efforts to trim, wax, pluck, shave, buff and shine every possibly inch of your body that may be seen by the doctor. Okay maybe not buff and shine. We'll save that for the car. But, the rest, you know it's true. It continues as we detail questions and scenarios in our head on our trip to the office. It doesn't stop there. While at the office, after mentally sizing up everyone in the waiting room and figuring out what their "deal" is, we wait for our name to be called. Once the nurse has brought us back to the promised land, we are forced to do what all woman love to do, and step on to the scale. But, not before removing our shoes to shed that extra half of a pound. Does the gyn even look at our weight anyway? And then we enter...

The culmination of all of the waiting and worrying happens when we are told to "take everything off and tie the gown in the front...". One day I am going to invent a decent and respectable gown for gynecological patients, but that's a post for another time. Standing in the exam room, alone, we begin to undress. This is the part where every grown woman, many of whom have given birth in front of this very same person, proceed to hide their bra and undies inside their other clothes. Whether it be tucked and folded up nicely underneath the pile of discarded garments, or balled up and shoved shamefully into the leg of your pants, you know you do it. Why? Why? Why do we do this? We are, for all intents and purposes, talking about a person who has in all likelihood, been elbow deep in your hoo-ha at some point in time. And yet we do it, every stinkin' time. Why?

When all is said and done, the whole shabang takes just a few minutes and it's a distant memory until next time. You're safe. Your vagina is all shiny and new. You can pull your panties out of your pant leg and go home. And while no one really enjoys the speculum, if you are anything like me, you realize that it hurts a lot less after pushing out three kids!

Read more about my gynecological escapades at my other writing gig Philadelphia Moms Blog.