Babies With No Gestation Time

One of my Pakistani husband's Pakistani friends from grad school married a Pakistani girl from the same grad school. They just had a baby boy. We never even knew she was pregnant! This is probably only because my husband refuses to use his Facebook page and is woefully uninformed about the goings-on of his friends and family, but it also reminds me of something I thought was weird when I first found out about it: sometimes Pakistanis don't talk about pregnancy until there's a real, live baby on the outside. It's quite a shock when you're not expecting it and you, like me, think of babies as taking some time to appear rather than just magically, one day, showing up.

One of his friends from college back in Pakistan came to America for grad school and told my husband that he should come also. He had already applied to some schools but also applied to the friend's school and ended up going to the friend's school, (mostly because of funding.) About two years after graduating and marrying me, while living in a different state than the friend, my husband got a phone call from the friend; he and his wife had a baby girl! I was like, what? That's a very good friend of yours, how could you not have known his wife was pregnant?

Also, on our first trip to Pakistan, we visited another grad school friend of my husband's. He'd actually graduated the same week I met M, and he'd returned to Pakistan to teach at a university in Lahore. We wanted to travel a bit during our first trip in Pakistan, including seeing Lahore, so he called up his Professor friend and made arrangements to visit. He and his new-ish wife (though they already had one baby) insisted we stay with them for the two nights we'd be in Lahore. They were lovely, wonderfully generous, kind and fun people - the most amazing hosts I've ever had before or since. But his wife was a niqabi - she covered her whole body and even her face in flowing fabric and all you could see were her eyes. I had a headache the first night and we were out until late the next night, so I went straight to bed both evenings and never even got a chance to spend any one-on-one time with her (meaning: I never got to see her uncovered.) So I never saw what she looked like at all, though from what I could see from outside the layers of fabric, she seemed....a bit plump. I am a bit plump myself, so I just thought even nicer of her husband, the Professor friend, for giving the larger ladies of the world some attention :)

You might already know where this is going, but just 7 weeks after returning to America, my husband got an email birth announcement of their second child. She'd been pregnant! We'd stayed with them for three days and two nights, wound through the crazy streets of Lahore together and no one had even mentioned it!

My husband says it's always been that way and that in the circles he runs in in Pakistan, nobody talks about pregnancy. "It's embarrassing," he said. He couldn't say exactly why it's embarrassing, though I think it has something to do with screaming from the rooftops "By the way, in case you didn't already know, I've been HAVING SEX!" He said it was different back then, when you'd still know what was happening. He could see various ladies expanding and hear them asking other ladies to borrow their larger clothes. "Hona walli hai," his mother would say - 'It's going to happen...." though no one ever said exactly what was going to happen. (Or how it happened, actually.) Nowadays we're usually far away from people living in different cities or countries. We can't see bellies expanding or who's wearing borrowed clothes. We just get baby pictures in emails.

(That's not true of M's close family, though. They've gotten advanced in this area in the past decade. So when his sister was pregnant she called to tell us as soon as she knew, and we told them within a few weeks when we were expecting. We've gotten pregnancy announcements even from cousins, so maybe this is changing throughout his entire socio-economic class back in Pakistan - I don't know. I assume different hierarchical levels in Pakistani society treat these sensitive matters differently, also, so it may be the case that the very rich have been speaking openly about pregnancy for decades or something.)