Having ridden shotgun on two pregnancies now, these warnings seem highly unnecessary. In my experience, pregnant women think of sex mainly as the root cause for every ache and ailment currently associated with their condition. Even when they do feel up to it, the sheer logistics of the act require well considered plans of attack at the least and, ideally, full scale schematic drawings.
I’ve also never known my wife to partake in any kind of horseback riding while pregnant. Given her difficulty getting up stairs, I doubt mounting a horse would start or end well. As for the vaginal objects…all I can say is that it’s never come up in discussions at our house.
Strange warnings, however, are generally rooted in reality. It may strike you as insulting that your bottle of Softscrub feels the need to remind you it’s not intended for human consumption. But somewhere, sometime somebody was cooking up a batch of cinnamon rolls, ran out of icing and thought a good bathroom cleanser would do just the trick.
Knowing that, I started wondering about the source of these pregnancy warnings. Pregnancy, as I know it anyway, is all about senseless yelling, weeping and sheer irrationality. With all the emotional outbursts and ensuing naps, where would your average pregnant woman find the time or energy to run a good steeplechase?
My mind instantly turned to thoughts of a massive conspiracy. It makes perfect sense when you consider that all the people who gave the warning to my wife were women. Never once have I heard a man tell my wife not to stick things in her vagina or avoid sex. No man would ever say something like that with another man around. Those two activities are hard enough to make happen without someone in the medical establishment coming out against them.
The frequency of the warnings also raises my suspicions. Maybe I’m imagining it, but I swear my wife’s doctor makes an extra effort to repeat these warning forcefully every time I’m in the room. If I hadn’t nodded my head in understanding, I probably would have been subject to some guerilla female communication campaign to further drill the notion into my head.
Watching a horse race on TV, the crawl at the bottom of the screen would read “keep your wife off of these.” I’d pick up a candle, or a spoon and a text message would appear on my cell phone reminding me not to stick either of those things into my wife. Pausing for a moment to reflect on how long it had been since I’d had sex, a disembodied voice from behind the couch would whisper “don’t even think about it, pal.”
All this, naturally, leads me to the conclusion that there must be some secret place pregnant women go during their down time when there husbands or boyfriends aren’t around. A theory made even more plausible given that many pregnant women, such as my wife, are on various forms of “bed rest” – giving them ample free time to do whatever they please. Perhaps this “bed rest” is, in fact, a scheme cooked up by the pregnantistas to provide plausible cover for an exciting double life filled with sex on horseback and vaginal insertion.
Can’t you just picture a couple of seven-months-pregnant women galloping across a sun-dappled, daisy-filled meadow astride magnificent stallions, hair flowing, bellies protruding, farting with complete impunity.
“Oh Stephanie, isn’t this magnificent?”
“It sure is Lisa. And to think, we’ve convinced our husbands that pregnancy is nothing but misery and pain! Let’s stay pregnant forever!”
“I agree Stephanie! My lips are a little chapped from all this sun, though. Can I borrow some lip gloss?”
“Sure Lis, I keep some here in my vagina next to my hand lotion and laptop.”
My wife, of course, claims no knowledge of such a place or anyone who’s heard of it. But the growing anger in her voice at my frequent accusations tells me she knows more than she’s letting on. It’s just a matter of time before she cracks in the face of my repeated and vehement inquisitions and tells all.
But even if I don’t break her, I can be comforted knowing that, as the partners of pregnant women, we have a secret little place of our own to ride out the pregnancy. My wife and all those other happy pregnant people can have their sexy horseback riding. We men will be down in the basement drinking alone.
