I’m not what you’d call a capital ‘A’ Activist, but after so much violence aimed at Planned Parenthood last year—the shootings, the threats, repeated government funding cuts to vital healthcare so many women and men needed—I decided to have my annual exam there this month.

It’s not that I thought I was some kind of super rebel or anything; it’s more that I want my actions to support my beliefs, one of which is that adults and young people need access to high-quality, affordable healthcare and reproductive education. Knowing I'm not just sitting on the sidelines makes for much better sleep at night. Plus, I’d seen way too much hostility and hate in the media lately, and I was tired of changing the channel, shutting down, feeling powerless to positively impact the way things went. So, I showed my support by showing up. I arrived at the clinic half expecting to see a mob of open-carry conservatives cruising the parking lot and raging fetus people lining the streets.

The squat gray building sat at the crossroads of a working class neighborhood and an old strip mall. The reception area was well-lit and open, the front desk, inviting. Even as a lower case activist, it wasn’t nearly as dramatic an entrance as I’d expected. It’s a good thing, too, because I didn’t have a danger contingency plan in place.

The woman at the desk explained their process and handed me the usual forms to complete. I filled them in by rote, checking boxes and entering insurance info where they asked me to. The doctor’s office looked like all the rest with its wall charts and diagrams, tongue depressors and plastic cutaway body parts on the counter. It was all so familiar. Until the doctor began asking about the information I’d given.

Until then, I’d never thought much about those forms and the explicit list of who in my family had what. Yet hearing myself ramble over answers about our history of health and disease made me take notice: in a culture so obsessed with the female body, it shocked me how little I really knew about my own.

Did anybody in your family have cancer? Yes. But what kind and who was it? I think I remember my grandmother had something with her ovaries—or was it natural causes. She was old when she got sick and I was too young. Back then, there wasn’t much adults said that wasn’t deemed ‘grown folks’ talk’, which meant there was a lot of information I simply didn’t get.

In your maternal or paternal line? Maternal. Isn’t it always the maternal line? I grew up almost entirely without my father and with him went everyone on his side. At Christmas, one of my brothers asked whether we remembered ‘that family vacation' we took. Of course we remembered; there had only been one, and it was to our father’s brother’s house in New England. We each remembered different aspects of that trip—the food, the ride, the cousins we’d never bond with—but none of us had forgotten the trip. Besides our genes, it was nearly all we had for things passed down through our paternal side.

Whenever we went to our grandparents’ house Daddy Frank could always be seen rocking slowly on the porch, a whiskered weather vane, his skin tight as red-brown leather. He smoked unfiltered Pall Malls like religion. I remember his yellowed nails and imagined his softness. He never hugged us, didn’t say much and his voice when spoke was low. Sometimes he’d wait so long between pulls on his cigarettes, the ash would be longer than the part left to smoke. Daddy Frank was more like a legend by the time I’d come along, fading in the southern sun underneath his crisp straw fedora and freshly pressed clothes, always looking like he was in no hurry, but on his way to somewhere else.

Did anyone have diabetes or cholesterol? Yes. Ma always had a pill or two she took for something. I’d only ever really knew it as her ‘medicine’, and didn’t ask what it was for. In my family, it was common for older folks t