Silver Stirrups
The stirrups are cold against your bare feet. A stinging, numbing chill that spreads from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head. You’re tempted to flee the room. Are they supposed to be this cold? You should have worn socks. Next time, you think, as you lay back on the table and the paper crinkles underneath your weight.
Your mom made the appointment for you because you have a boyfriend now. Apparently, that’s reason enough. She wants you to get ahead of things, be proactive. You’re not sure what that means. You’re not having sex though, not yet. Your parents always said to wait until marriage, anyways.
The doctor tells you, “Just relax.” For a moment, you wonder if she’s joking. The skin on the back of your legs sticks to the thin paper lining on the table, every slight movement announced by a loud crinkle. The fluorescent lights scrutinize you from the white grid ceiling. You can hear a doctor on the other side of the door talking loudly about the weather, how hot it’s been this summer. There’s a medical student in the room, shadowing. You’re afraid you’ll do something crazy, like faint and pass out. What if your body scares them away from medical school forever? You should have shaved beforehand. Did you wash well enough last night? Did you use soap? You bend your knees inwards towards one another, feet still in the silver stirrups.
“This will be a bit cold,” the doctor warns. She holds up a metal speculum covered in goopy, clear jelly. You’re already cold so you think that it can’t be much worse. “Just relax,” she says again, but the moment the speculum tries to pry you apart, your body slams shut like a heavy door, kneecaps crush against one another in some strange dance your body knows on its own. You yelp and the doctor laughs, nervous. “We’ll use the child size,” she says. You’re seventeen. Is that normal? Your body feels like it’s three sizes too small. You shrink into the table.
The child size doesn’t work, either. It’s too hard, too cold - why can’t it be made of something soft and nice, like your cotton underwear? Why does it look like the pair of metal prongs that your parents keep in the drawer next to the stove? “We’ll just do the swab,” the doctor says. “But next time, you need a full exam.” Your face screws up in pain as the swab slides in against resistance. She asks if you wear tampons. You lie and say yes.
You remember the first time you tried to wear a tampon. It was the summer before seventh grade. You’d had your period for nearly two years, the first one of your friends to get it. All the adults told you to wait to try a tampon, so you did, pushed it off until blood showed up in your underpants the day you were supposed to go to the lake. You sat on the cold tile floor of your bathroom and gingerly unfolded the paperthin instructions that were buried at the bottom of the tampon box. On the diagram was a rendering of a hairless vagina with so few folds - was yours supposed to look like that, too? You used a hand mirror to see. You found the right hole, at least. But your hand trembled as you pressed the plastic against your skin, deep breath, then two, then three, then you pushed it inside of you and your whole body screamed. The tampon went in, the only evidence of its existence the little string that hung between your legs, but you felt it in there like a missile ramming against the walls of your uterus. You wanted it out, out, out, but you were too afraid to pull, so you called for your mom. While you cried on the bathroom toilet, she pulled it out for you - one, two, three, yank. Your vagina felt like a bee sting.
You haven’t tried tampons again. You keep them in your backpack, though, because your friends always ask for them, and they crinkle their noses when they spy the yellow-wrappered pad that falls out of your backpack onto the locker room floor after gym class. “You still wear those?” they ask. Quickly jam it back into your bag. They say they like tampons better. You lie and agree.
Everyone believes your lie. The doctor recommends using lube. “If and when you choose to have intercourse,” she adds. You don’t even know where to buy lube, but you nod quietly. You just want to go home, and you want to put pants back on. Your mom waits outside to drive you home. When she asks how the appointment went, you say it was fine.
The first time you do have sex, it ends in giggles. “I’m really tight,” you warn, which you’ve heard is a good thing, better for him. His penis hits against you and your legs snap shut. “Sorry,” you mumble. You tell yourself it’s a good thing, that you must feel good for him, even if it hurts for you. He says it’s all okay, it’s normal. It’s his first time too, and he read that it can be hard to figure out, all the angles and shapes bodies can make. After an hour, you stop trying. The attempt ends in a fit of awkward laughter, a promise that it will get better the next time. You brush it away as a silly first time story that you’ll tell at parties when you’re older.
But it happens again. Again, again, again. How long until it’s supposed to be easy, how long until it feels good? Your body has a high-tech security system you don’t recall installing.
You cry in his basement bedroom because you don’t know what’s wrong with you, and he tells you it’s okay, it’s all okay. He says that nothing is wrong but when you go over to your friend’s house and you sit in her parent’s hot tub and play “Never Have I Ever,” not once does anyone bring up how much it hurts, how sex makes your vagina feels like it’s full of a million little needles that poke and prod at you from the inside. “Maybe a little the first time,” one of your friends shrugs. You laugh in agreement, but you glance down at your body and wonder what’s wrong with it. You wish you could shed your skin, watch it melt away in the bubbling hot tub water.
In college, you see your boyfriend on weekends. In his lofted bed in his tiny dorm room, you sob into his pillow. His roommate asks if he can come back in the room, if you’re done yet. It should be working by now, you think, but every time he gets near your vagina, it feels like your lower half is on fire, you feel it in your fingertips and your legs grow so heavy you can’t move them. He tells you, “We don’t have to,” he doesn’t want to hurt you, but you pull at your hair and muffle a scream because you’re supposed to be able to do this, isn’t this what bodies were made for? Why does yours reject the very thing you want the most, why does yours dampen the adrenaline of sticky bodies and shaking organisms with this icepick pain?
You wipe your tears. His roommate returns to the room and winks at both of you.
When your college friends ask about your sex life, you tell them that it’s great. And parts of it are, the parts in which you don’t try and force his penis inside of you. But most of the time, your vagina feels like it’s home to a long-clawed demon that wants to pry its way out of you, nails constantly scratching at tender muscles. Your boyfriend tells you that it’s okay to stop trying, that together, you can just do things that don’t hurt. You say that nothing should hurt, that you’re defective. That makes him cry for you, but you don’t want tears. You just want a normal fucking vagina.
Once you graduate college, you decide to visit some more doctors. You’re passed along from specialist to specialist, all with their cold stirrups and snapping speculums. At least this time, you wear socks. At the OBGYN, the walls are lined with photos of pregnant women. Your stomach aches. In the examination room, you take off your pants and lie there. The doctor lists off some words you don’t understand: vaginismus, vulvodynia, pelvic floor dysfunction. They send you to the next specialist.
Her name is Sue, and her whole job is to help people with these problems. She tells you this is normal, we’ll get it all fixed up. You think it can’t be that normal, because you’ve never heard of it before. She asks if you have any sexual trauma. You tell her you don’t remember, too many blurry memories of your childhood scattered in between the sunshine-backyard-make believe. She fills out your chart and then tells you to get comfortable.
Once a week, she sticks her finger up your vagina and presses on its stinging walls. She brings you heated blankets for your stomach and a comfortable pillow to lay back on. Breathe, she tells you. You watch your stomach rise as you breathe in. One, two, three. The whole while, she chats with you, tells you about her teenage daughters and asks about your job. You try your best to carry on the conversation like this is totally normal, that there’s nowhere else you’d rather be chatting than on an examination table with a finger inside of you. On your way out, she gives you multi-sized plastic cylinders that fit together like Russian stacking dolls. Dilators, she calls them, twice a week, start with the smallest and move all the way up. The final one is so big you feel sick in your throat.
You hate the dilators. They’re cold, like a speculum, so you warm them up underneath your heating pad right before you use them, even though their plastic shell isn’t made for heat. Sue tells you to do something fun while using them, to trick your brain into enjoying itself while you sit there and shove plastic up your vagina, but no matter what comfort show you watch or book you try to read during, you still hate them. You hate the way they stick against your skin, the way the lube dries up so quickly, the way you can’t seem to get past the third one, even though Sue says the fact that you’re at the third one is progress in itself. She says that you’re doing better, but sex still feels like a knife in your cervix - less sharp than before, but a knife nonetheless. Your legs feel out of control and your body feels like it belongs to somebody else, and you wish that it did, that you could hand it off and ask for a new one in exchange and leave yours behind to rot.
You stop seeing Sue. You can get his penis in over halfway now, so you decide not to go. You shove the box of dilators underneath your bed and let them collect dust. There’s this one position that doesn’t hurt as bad anymore, on your stomach, and sometimes it actually feels good. Plus, you can hide your face if you flinch. That works, for a while, but months later, you start to cry, bite the pillow and he stops. “Is it hurting again?” he asks. No, not much, but you feel like a limp doll, like a one-trick-wonder, you wish you could move during sex, throw your body around like the girls in porn do, but whenever you try, the pain grows sharp and your legs spasm out of control, so you just have to lie there, and you want to enjoy it more, you long for it, but your body won’t listen. He suggests doing different things instead, to make it better for you, but that’s not what you’re asking for, you want a new body, so you say that, sob it into your pillow. He says he loves the body you have. You want to peel yours apart, layer by layer. Your body has betrayed you, time and time again. You don’t want to love it. You don’t know if you can. But you’re willing to try again.
So you find another Sue. Her name is Anne, and every week she tells you that you’re doing a good job, that the muscle tissue feels softer, even though you keep forgetting to use the dilators at home. You’d rather glare at their box from across the room. You do the stretches, at least, so maybe that’s what’s helping - child’s pose, downward dog. Your own little dog likes to stand underneath you while you stretch your body into a V, like he’s your coach telling you not to lower yourself down, not yet. In the bathtub, you finger the dilators, sometimes slide one or two inside of you, close your eyes and breathe, breathe, breathe.
The doctor keeps sending you emails. It’s time for your pelvic exam, seven years overdo. Maybe if you just don’t bring it up, they won’t make you do it. You should know better, you work in reproductive health - you believe that sexual health is important, just not your own. When you get your flu shot, your doctor corners you, sits across from you in the white-walled room and says, “Let’s get it on the calendar now.” You can’t back out, so you smile and nod and she types your name into an appointment slot.
The morning before your appointment, you lather your vulva with lidocaine, stick a finger into your vagina and spread the numbing cream as far up as you can. You hope that’s enough. Is this what it means to love your body, to drag it to these appointments and shove numbing cream up your body? You add some more lidocaine cream, just for good measure. The drive to the appointment goes by too quickly, every light green as if to taunt you. In the examination room, your doctor smiles at you and asks you to lie back. You can feel the cold of the stirrups through your wool socks. “Are you ready?” your doctor asks. You take a deep breath.
Erin Moynihan (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer who writes about trauma, the body, and mental health. Her editorial work has appeared in Huffington Post, The Mighty, and Buzzfeed. Her debut fiction novel, LAUREL EVERYWHERE, hit shelves November 2020.