I don’t know when it started – perhaps somewhere between my 20th and 21st week of pregnancy. I was at my monthly prenatal check up, and my OBGYN – a nerdy dude in his mid-50’s or so – was doing the usual stuff, ie blood pressure, weight, measuring my belly, listening for the heart beat. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he started looking kinda hot. Like really hot.
I don’t know if it’s just one of those patient/doctor fantasy things, or the fact that he seems to know everything about what I’m going through and I can’t get my husband to read one damn pregnancy book. Or maybe it’s that he chose to be an OBGYN for a living, to help steer women through the current shitstorm of reproductive healthcare, to guide us through the chaos of pregnancy and into our most primordial state of being. To celebrate our power and help us access it instead of fearing it.
HOT.
I picture him at undergrad or med school deciding which field to pursue. A super smart, intuitive student who had the world at his fingertips. He could’ve bro’d out and gone into sports medicine or Orthopedics. He could’ve gone the moneybags route with plastic surgery or cosmetic dermatology. All of which I would think are way more chill than being called in the middle of the night to come be my knight in shining armor, to deliver MY baby and tell me everything’s going to be OK while my husband’s napping in the corner of the delivery room.
Either way I started fantasizing about said OB on a regular basis – sex in the exam room, ripping my gown off with abandon, all of it. My feet in stirrups and his head between them. I started wearing my bodycon maternity looks to our visits and I even put on mascara for the first time since my 12th week of pregnancy. Once, when I was shown to his colleague’s room instead, I nearly wept on the spot.
That’s when I realized I had a problem.
“You’re probably just super horny,” my friend told me over mocktails the next night. “You’ve got all these hormones coursing through your body. He’s this beacon of wisdom and calm during a super unsettling time. I get it. But instead of crying into your gown, go have sex with your husband instead.”
A quick search on Babycenter made me feel less alone – that the “crushing on your doctor” trope is not just normal, but it’s as old as time. In fact, it was the plotline for nearly half of the VHS tapes in my parent’s porno stash I discovered at age 16.
“Having a fantasy of someone in power or with a specific set of knowledge relevant to you is totally normal, especially when you’re in a vulnerable state like pregnancy and they’re the purveyor of that knowledge,” my psychotherapist friend told me. “I guess I would just question if he represents something to you that’s missing elsewhere, like support or partnership.”
At the end of the day, this whole pregnancy thing has me feeling super vulnerable. Birth is intimate stuff and this is a man who tends to me on a regular basis, asks me how I’m feeling and wants to know every detail of my life. He patiently answers every question I have. I just need to remember he’s being paid to do so.
The next day I implored my husband to be more interested in the ins and outs of my pregnancy as well as in our future role as parents. Maybe I was just seeking companionship on a very lonely road. He apologized and said he didn’t realize I needed him more than he was offering himself. He began reading “Bringing Up Bebe.” Hot.
We had sex that night. By week 24, I had a new OB.
