I Brought My Mom To My IUI. She Wanted Me To Bring A Vibrator.

In the room, naked but for a paper gown, a matter-of-fact nurse named either Mary or Linda told me to lie back and relax. My mom, my most devoted coconspirator as always, sat beside me and took my hand. I put my feet in the stirrups — never exactly Shakespeare in the Park — and closed my eyes. I could feel my mother pressing all her hope and faith through her soft palm into my sweaty flesh. As Mary or Linda inserted and maneuvered her wand and administered her spermly magic, I tried to dissociate from reality, and go to a higher place, and invite the magic in.

When the procedure was over, the nurse said I could lie there and rest for a few minutes, to let everything “settle.” Before she left, I touched her wrist and thanked her for helping me start a family. “Good luck,” she said, neither here nor there. After she left the room, I told my mom I wanted to be still and mellow, and meditate for a few minutes, with my legs up in the air so the sperm could swim like they mean it. But she had another idea in mind.

“Did you bring a vibrator?” she whispered, not quietly.

“What? Mom! No! Why would I . . .”

She had read in a magazine that a woman should have an orgasm after an IUI, to simulate “real sex,” and to enhance the flow of things. Non-scientifically speaking, it kind of actually made sense, and I’m not just saying that because I probably wrote the piece. But still! There was no way.

Gross Mom Factor aside, my vibrator had been dead for at least two years. The fact that I couldn’t find the motivation to locate the right charger in the last 730 days, and that it was probably shoved in a drawer with busted headphones, loose peanut M&M’s, and random stray earrings even though I don’t have my ears pierced, was not a great look in terms of my domesticity meter. But neurotic parents make neurotic kids, right?

My lack of a sex toy did not matter to my mother as she folded herself into the en suite medical closet, yelling at me to get off “the old-fashioned way!”

Now. We are a ride-or-die family, and my mom and I were born troublemakers, but her asking me to rub one out so that I could give her a second grandchild was too much, even for me.

Did she listen? Oh hell no.

However, I will say, her antics did more good than harm.

Because this imagery of my mother, screaming, “Think of Dr. Grifo! Think of Dr. Grifo!” — my silver-fox fertility doctor who we both often fantasized about — was the best thing I ever saw.

And suddenly I was laughing hysterically. We laughed as I got myself dressed and as I paid the otherwise unfunny IUI bill. We laughed on the F train home, my head on her shoulder in between the giggle fits. We laughed telling the story to everyone we encountered, the more inappropriate the person, the better. And we laughed ourselves to sleep that night. And I for one believe that our overflowing and unbound joy made all the difference.

Because seven or eight weeks later, we were back in that room, and my sister was with us this time. Dr. Grifo cruised in (if he only knew any of the above) and squirted some cold jelly on my stomach. I already knew I was pregnant from the seventy pregnancy tests I had taken in the last month, and the seventeen falafels that I had already inhaled out of starvation. But I also knew it was early and I was old and there were fibroids, and that there were no promises that the pregnancy would stick, or that the baby even had a heartbeat.

“Your baby has a heartbeat,” said Dr. Grifo in his calm, steady tone, but this time with a faint tinge of really freakin’ psyched for you. “A strong, healthy heartbeat.”

“Is it going to be okay, Dr. Grifo?” I asked, with my heart in my throat. My sister was bawling. My mother was beaming. Grifo had a twinkle in his eye and finally broke into a big, substantial smile. The smile I had been waiting for. “All I can say is: you’re in the game.”

From This Might Be Too Personal: And Other Intimate Stories by Alyssa Shelasky. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Alyssa Shelasky is the editor of New York Magazine's Sex Diaries and the author of Apron Anxiety. She is also starring in and producing the Sex Diaries docuseries on HBO. She has written for numerous publications including the New York Times, People, Town & Country, Women’s Health, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn Heights.