At the end of the weekly Sunday phone call, my mother-in-law asks, “So, have you got your periods this month?” I stammer, dumbfounded. I didn’t expect this. No one, in all my 27 years of life, has asked me this. My menstrual cycle is nobody’s business but mine. I mumbled a reply and cut the call, fuming. I’ve been married for just a few months! The entire world, it seems, is waiting with bated breath for “good news” from me.
I am still getting used to being a married woman. The feeling that I’m now a ‘wife’ to a man is just sinking in. I remember how as I was getting dressed for my wedding reception, the beautician said to me, “Your husband is waiting outside.” For a split-second, I wondered who the ‘husband’ was and then realised I got married that morning.
Being a mother is a whole other ball game. I need time to decide when and if I want to become one. When I was pushing 30 and single, people wondered why I wasn’t getting married and now that I am, they wonder why I’m not pregnant yet. Sometimes, when a relative suggests I go the family way as early as possible, I wonder if motherhood is a natural progression from wifehood.
A week after I got married, an aunt sat me down and said, “I know you working women like to postpone pregnancy. But take it from me; get pregnant as soon as possible. It’s the most beautiful thing.” I shuddered at the thought — what if I don’t find the experience beautiful?
“This is how it is,” a friend told me when she became pregnant barely a month after she got married. “If you get married to the right person, why delay pregnancy?” At the end of every phone conversation with me, she asks, “So, any news yet?” I’ve stopped taking her calls after the third time she asked me this. Then there are the friends who put up photos of their little “princesses” and “princes” on Facebook. An innocent ‘like’ will result in their sending me a message: “And when can we see yours?”
“Your body clock is ticking.” says a doctor friend. She gently reminds me to start on folic acid supplements every time I talk to her. I’m being watched: from the house help who almost shrieked when she saw jackfruit seeds in the bin (she suggests I don’t eat jackfruit, papaya, and pineapple since they are bad for the uterus if I conceive), to the neighbour who smiles questioningly when she sees me at home on a working day…why won’t they just let me be?
I tell myself that I would become a mother only when I am ready. And when is that? I don’t know yet.
