Parenting: Stranger and stranger

If you’ve ever been the person to tell a woman it’s time to have a child, then you should be ashamed of yourself.

I’m standing at the counter of a shop for baby and kids with my almost-three -year-old. We’re buying water bottles for nursery school. She’s scampering around and as I call out her name, the woman in line behind me looks up suddenly and smiles, telling me that her daughter has the same name. Oh what a coincidence, we laugh. We exchange pleasantries about our daughters: how old each is, which schools they’re at, how we feel about said schools. As I’m paying, this completely amicable stranger asks me if this is my first and only child. I say yes, and suddenly she morphs from being a perfectly nice stranger whose only connection with me is that our daughters share a common name into a monster whose desire seems to be to convince me to add to Pakistan’s already ridiculous natural increase rate.

I’d like to say there was an iota of reason in what followed. I’d love to say she meant well, but I’ve stopped making excuses and I’ve given up lying.

“It’s time to get pregnant again,” the stranger said, “she needs the company,” she added by way of explanation. She has many friends at school, I reasoned. “But what about when she comes home?” prompts my new life coach. Then as if this isn’t bad enough, she starts talking directly to my daughter, squatting low to look her in the eye and telling her to ask mama for a sibling, to say mama please let me be a big sister, oh won’t you please?

And just like that, this episode goes from being severely uncomfortable to resembling a Lynchian surrealist nightmare.

This woman who appears to be brainwashing my child doesn’t know a thing about me. She doesn’t even know my name. She doesn’t know if I or my husband are infertile, if my child is even biologically mine or adopted. She doesn’t know if I’ve recently miscarried, or am going through a traumatic and painful hormonal treatment. She presumes I am married — she doesn’t allow for the possibility that I am widowed or d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d (shock horror). Hell, maybe I just don’t want another child (recent research shows only children to be smarter and more successful than one of multiples — go Google it). And, most importantly, she doesn’t realise that this is none of anyone else’s business.

I would love to say I told her smartly off and left her jaw hanging at that counter on behalf of every woman who has faced such a situation, but I didn’t. I took my child’s hand and we walked away. I have heard this countless times since my daughter turned one. I have heard it from friends, from family and now from a complete stranger. I would like to think each of them meant well each time. But sometimes I wonder if they were part of a classic vicious circle, a silent legacy of pressure tactics that pushed them into multiple children and now pushes them to offer the same opinion to others, largely unwarranted. Or perhaps they’re happy with many children, perhaps they’ve never had any issues, from conception to graduation.

But here, now, I’d like to say what I wanted to say to each of those women.  If you’ve ever been the person to tell a woman it’s time  to have a first/second/third child, if you’re that stranger, that friend, that sister, that mother or that mother-in-law, then you should be ashamed of yourself. You may think that by being a mother of multiple children you can guide others as to when and how to bear theirs, but you’re wrong. You only know your own life and you only ever will. You do not know another woman’s potential to be a mother, of one child or more. You do not know her life, her reproductive organs, you do not know her world, and you do not how much love she has to give. Do not presume.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2010.