CHENNAI : My mother stopped in her tracks when I announced loudly that my friend is pregnant. For a moment I wondered if I had said something blasphemous or even worse, if this was going to trigger an episode of ‘everyone but you’. Thankfully for me, it turned out that my mother was shocked by my proclamation because the above-mentioned friend is male. “Umm…Amma”, I said, “It’s his baby also, no? And he’s also anxiously waiting for the same number of months as his partner. Of course I’m allowed to say he’s pregnant. Rather, we should all be saying it like that.”
She scoffed at me, muttered under her breath about the dozen kids that could’ve been easier to mother than one of me, and that was the end of it. Since this conversation, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what made the phrase ‘they’re pregnant’ laughable for her. But it’s not just her, I understood. Most women I know would laugh at me for using that phrase, and I’m referring to women from different walks of life and various financial, communal and educational backgrounds.
Reasons for deriding ‘they’re pregnant’ or shying away from ‘we’re pregnant’ is aplenty, especially in our culture. First of course is that pregnancy is a ladies matter, so how can I possibly be saying ‘he is pregnant’? Then comes the biology — the baby is growing inside her, not him. Men are not struck down by giddiness, violent aches, nausea, morning sickness, cravings, mood swings and every other symptom that could arise in a pregnant body. So it happens that the woman is all prayers and strict diets for the baby, and the man is all nerves and whiskey about the health of the baby and the state of the nerves respectively – which is only to say men manage to live their lives with little or no changes to accommodate the pregnancy.
Let’s not forget that several women still make it back to their maternal homes while pregnant to get adequate attention, which apparently husbands and partners cannot provide. This keeps the men out of touch from every day needs of his pregnant partner, further alienating him from the process. ‘She is pregnant’ could very well also be the tagline for ‘Look her life and body are changing’ — a way to say that now she’s going to have a baby and from then nothing is going to be the same for her. For the partner, it’s the same story — home, work and back home again except there’s another human in his life. Finally I realised, only ‘she is pregnant’ works easily for a society that is quick to blame a young woman for ‘getting herself pregnant’ as if she miraculously did it by herself, and curses women who have no control over their bodies or access to contraception for the country’s population.
All this happens, but there are also ‘alive and kicking (or wiping ass) in this world partners’ who plan pregnancies with prospective child-bearers, potential fathers who immerse in reading to understand what the mother is going through, stay and experience from as close as possible what pregnancy feels like, maintain same diets in solidarity, ensure that any change in lifestyle is equally shared, explore paternity leaves and being stay-at home dads, participate fully in the process of pregnancy and proudly announce to the world ‘we are pregnant’ because it is as much his baby as it is hers.
In dire admiration of dads changing diapers, expressing paternal love for plaits, and those super-partners who recognise what it takes for his partner to be pregnant and then be supportive through it, I set forth a plea to begin using the phrases, ‘We are pregnant’, ‘They are pregnant’ and even ‘he is pregnant’. Because pregnancy is not one person’s job, child care needs to be shared, and parents are both equally emotionally invested in the child. Maybe changing the language of pregnancy can help change perception of the man’s role in it, and trigger joint action instead of astonishment about men being pregnant.