It is now 4.26 p.m on Monday, and the office is really quiet. There is an event so almost everyone is elsewhere, which suits me just fine since I am not in the mood to smile at people today. My mood today…well it is just peachy. And by “peachy,” I really meant “sour.”
Over this weekend, I have, from 3 separate instances, heard questions from relatives directed towards me and/or my husband on when we were going to have kids. The more tactful ones come in the form of “are you guys planning to have kids?” while the…less delicate ones really leave a bad taste in my mouth. As Sunday was Father’s Day, a question directed at my husband was “Next year Father’s Day?” accompanied with a presumably cheeky smile.
See here, the problem is that the asker is, most of the time, lovely. They have always behaved kindly and generously towards me, and being around them is usually pleasant. They are not the stereotypical malicious relative who asks far too many questions and act like they have a right to your life.
And yet.
I cannot help but replay that question in my mind, and each replay just brings more discomfort. Why would it not? If we were to strip away the social niceties of the question, it was essentially asking is “hey, when are the two of you going to have unprotected s*x?” There we go. Strip away all the flesh and this is the skeleton of the question. Isn’t it?
I am not daft. I know very well that most do not think far or deeply into what they said before they said it. What does it matter? The impact of the statement still lands the same way.
I am not uncharitable either. See, I know. I know that most of the time, the asker did not mean it the way I saw it. I know that they might have meant well. I know that in the cultural context of Singapore where our society is heavily nuclear-family-oriented, most older relatives and family members feel very strongly about a family unit with children. I know that most of them see children as both a necessity and a blessing. I know that most of the time, it is meant as a joke, as a “when are you guys moving on to the next step of your lives together” kind of question. I know. It does not change the fact that questions about children remain highly invasive and indelicate. It does not change the fact that it makes the couple in question highly uncomfortable. It does not change the fact that said couple would experience the paranoia that everyone at the table is reminded, implicitly, of the activities that the couple would have to engage in to result in said children. And that is uncomfortable. At least, for me.
Perhaps in a couple of years’ time, I might feel less bothered by such questions. But at the moment where I have not yet been married very long, where I am still a student, where I have not yet gotten my bloody BTO flat, where I am sure to be completely unready, both financially and emotionally, for a child for at least the next 2-3 years, the thought of having a child is nothing but nightmarish. The thought of enduring what I am currently enduring, what with being in graduate school and all, while navigating all the changes that come with pregnancy—losing my sense of balance as my body changes, morning sickness, etc…it is a no brainer that I find the thought of having children unsavoury, isn’t it? Having a child right now would wreck me.
What compounds the discomfort is that this was not the first time that we were pelted with this sort of question. To my husband’s credit, he has always responded with “no, we are not planning to have any kids yet.” However, it seems that askers never get tired of asking the same indelicate question every. damn. time. Again, they are great people. They are kind and generous people who have often shown us care when they did not need to. It honestly isn’t their fault that they do not comprehend the indelicacy of the situation, if I think about it. After all, this is just the cultural climate that Southeast Asians of East Asian descent find ourselves in. The elders will always ask about children while the juniors are expected to grin and bear it. Of course, most of the time it is good-natured ribbing. So were these times. Quite the dance, if you ask me.
But goddamn do I not find it infuriating.
Look, my husband and I are just not planning to have children yet, alright? The idea of children is not off the table. It is still a possibility. But that is not the situation that many couples out there find themselves in. There are couples who are unable to have children, who struggle with fertility issues. Imagine being one of these couples being faced with this sort of questions, what kind of a slap in the face is that? And what are they supposed to do, just grit their teeth and continue to grin and bear it? Or are they supposed to tell you about their fertility issues, exposing their personal medical history, their vulnerability—presumably a raw and painful one—to you? Talk about putting someone between the devil and the deep blue sea, huh? Even if they chose to disclose their personal medical information in the form of their fertility struggles with you, what then? You end up feeling guilty for unknowingly poking at someone’s wound, and they end up feeling exposed and raw, and all these could have been avoided if we just collectively understand that such questions are inappropriate and should not be asked. Good-natured ribbing remains good-natured only when you know for sure that there is no real jab to it.
But back to me.
As the person who would bear the brunt of the pregnancy, since I am, of course, the person who would bear the child, I cannot describe the discomfort of such questions. The question may have been posed to us, but to put it plainly, the answer is directed at my body, is it not? I am the one who would have to get pregnant. I am the one who would experience any health risks that come with it. I am the one who would experience the bulk of any career interruptions. I am the one who would bear most of the social expectations of parenting. No matter how involved the father in modern parenting is, it remains an immovable fact that in most societies, much less Singapore, mothers are expected to shoulder the majority of the responsibilities of being parents. The question was innocuous, the asker was well-intentioned (or at least, not malicious), but there is something in the question that strips the agency from me as an individual. In that one simple question is everything that could affect me and change my entire life. My career, my health (in the worst case, my life), my personhood. In that moment, I have become reduced to the mechanism by which the supposed purpose of this marriage is to be fulfilled.
There is also the deeply personal part of me that felt stung and invisible. I am an adult, with all the legal aspects to it. I have been an adult according to the laws of this land for long enough that were I to announce that I am in the family way, no one would bat an eyelid. My getting married was met with reactions of congratulations, not speculation on the possibility that circumstances in which I had found myself with child had compelled the marriage, simply because I was at the age where marriage would be considered reasonable. But. I was prepared to enter into a lawful union. Doing so does not mean that I was prepared for motherhood. To immediately be categorised as a “mother-in-waiting” felt sad, in a way. I have other things in life that I want to accomplish—being a mother is one of the possibilities—and it is almost as if every other possibility were stripped from my person in the eyes of others just because I chose to enter into matrimony.
The problem with such questions lies in the unfortunate fact that that such questions often come from the ones that we love. They are not bad people. If they were people we detest, it would be much easier. We could just file that incident neatly under our folder of Interactions With Bad People and we could sleep easier at night for it. But most of the time, these people are kind, generous, and warm people who remember details about you like your birthdays. These are the people who would not hesitate to offer you a helping hand when you need it. In their minds, perhaps, this sort of questions could even be their form of a blessing. I do not think that they meant to injure me. In fact, I have enough faith in their characters that if they were to know that I would have minded it, they would have been more tactful. I can acknowledge that even as I know that this sort of question should never have been asked, in the first place.
That is the unavoidable part of having people in your life, I believe. People can be kind and warm, and yet they can still unwittingly say thoughtless words that feel like ashes on your tongue. It is simply an inevitable fact of ordinary life that all the kindness in the world could not prevent the sting of careless words. No, their kindness does not neutralise the carelessness. But yes, their carelessness does not erase the many instances of warmth and care.
I suppose it would serve me to remember the Little Prince’s rose.
“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wished to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
But I can still feel vexed until I am done feeling vexed. I am not a saint, after all!
Series of Ordinary Days 
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