Me and babes lately

My goodness, is it really May? Was it Cinco de Mayo yesterday? This academic year has sped by. But we still have about 5 or 6 weeks left. Then school’s out for summer. YAY!

I went for my first trimester special tests. I am in a low risk category, but I figure that since the technology exists for pre-natal (or ante-natal as it is known by the Brit term here) screenings, one should take advantaged. Alhamdulillah, all looked well at the scan. The technition told me he could already see the gender of the fetus but could be wrong by a 15% margin. Did I want to know? At 13 weeks? With an 85% chance of accuracy? Yep, okay. So he told me. I will wait a few more weeks for a more accurate assessment of the gender. I don’t care either way. But it is fun to know. I don’t know how some people these days purposely don’t want to know. I am SOOO impatient and can’t imagine not knowing for 40 long weeks and then SURPRISE! Out comes a …. I read that in the olden days some people didn’t even know they were carrying twins until the day they gave birth. Subhanallah, technology is so advanced nowadays, it takes the suspense away.

I have been cooking “weird” things due to the pregancy. The other day I made quiche. I don’t like eggy foods, so that is why quiche is weird for me. I also made a Tex-Mex taco salad for dinner last night. American faux Mexican taco shells are very expensive here, so I used Mr. Chibs. That’s an Omani brand. Crunchy tortilla chips fresh from the Sultanate with a picture of a guy in a sombrero on the front. They were nakhat al beeza but I didn’t realize that until I got home. Pizza flavored taco salad. It was pretty good though. I had it again for lunch today.

My poor husband today requested that I make “daal chanwal.” I think he is getting sick of my strange experiments.

My mind is preoccupied with thoughts of my summer trip to mi patria de Tejas. I miss home. I have been researching pre-paid cellphones, and also looking into car rental. It’s just gonna be Lady D and I. No husband. It is going to be weird for my daughter, I suppose. Inshallah she will adjust well to a month of being beamed down into a totally different environment. She is more social than before when she was going through a major “stranger danger” clingy stage. She loves baba the best, and I know she is going to miss him.

Funny how she spends most of her time with the nanny or with me, but baba is her favorite-est person in the universe. I think it is because the nanny and me are often doing other things with Lady D around, but baba gets to just come home from work and give her his undecided attention. Since we have a nanny, he doesn’t help in any household tasks. That’s fine by me. Anyway, Lady D is the star of his show and she knows it. When I get home from work, she asks me “baba ka?” which means “baba kahaan hain?” or where is daddy? When he gets home she jumps into his arms. I admit I feel small pangs of jealousy about this, but actually this has benefits for me. Just a few months before, she was extremely clingy with me and when we would go out she would insist I carry her. She refused to go to baba. She was so heavy and would cry if I tried to pass her on or put her down. But now she happily lets baba carry her so my arm and back don’t give out.

I was planning to not let her watch TV until she turned 2. But we have this video of kids songs and I let her watch it nowadays for 10-20 minutes a day. It is just a VCD of kids dancing around to Old MacDonald, etc. She is mesmerized and turns into a little zombie fixated on the TV screen. She demands it whenever she sees the TV. She says “kahtoon! kahtoon!”, which you can guess means cartoon. That’s what she calls it. I can totally see why experts say no TV before 2. But now that I’ve opened a can of worms…anyway. Like I said, I limit the time. What more can I do?

 

Anyway, that’s all my rambling for now.

 

 

 

Maternity Garb

I was pleased to find some long, full sleeved maternity shirts. Last time I was pregnant, I just wore Arabic style house dresses underneath abayas. This was fine for Dubai, but when I was in the US, it was really difficult. The experience wearing a headscarf in the US is challenging, but pair it with a long black abaya and the negativity is heightened. I ended up finding one long shirt at a maternity shop and wore that EVERYDAY for the last few days of my trip. This year I will be in the US for a little over a month. I feel extra sensitive while pregnant, so it makes it even harder to deal with all of the shit. Anyhow, I will have me some nice long shirts to wear. YAY! No threatening black abaya which somehow causes people to think that they can yell at me, follow me around the store, make jokes about me right in front of my face, or worse. The prospect of all of the hate was very daunting. So hopefully that will alleviate some of it. In Dubai, the worst I have to deal with just in terms of the scarf is patronizing comments from Western colleagues: Aren’t you hot in that? Can you hear well with that? blah blah blah. Strangers never harass me for my scarf overe here, though. It is actually very intimidating and frightening. I admire the strength of those of you who live in majority non-Muslim societies and go through that stuff frequently. For me, it is the biggest down side of my month to six week trips to my homeland.

 

Went n got ma self knocked up again

I am in the last week of the first trimester. So it is time for the announcement. It was a planned pregnancy. I did what I did last time. I just quit the pill, did one pill free month, then in the second pill free cycle I watched for physical signs of ovulation about 14 days after the first day of my period. That’s how it happened. Lady D will be 23 months when Baby 2 is born, Inshallah. I know these days everyone is into a 3 year gap, but I just felt that now is the right time.

I have gained a lot of weight in just 3 months. About 10 pounds or more. When I was pregnant with Lady D I hardly gained any weight the first trimester, but I gained a normal amount of weight in the end. This time I have been very nauseous, but I have only vomited a handful of times, not daily. To stave off the nausea, I have been eating carby stuff non-stop. Plus I feel too nauseous to walk or move around for light exercise. I feel the weight one puts on in the first trimester is the hardest to lose post-delivery. So it sucks to have gained so much. My belly started popping out in week 9. That didn’t happen till about week 13 last time. I read that after one’s first pregnancy, the pouch shows more quickly because the abdominal muscles are stretched out. So that’s normal, I guess. Both this time and last time my backside and thighs grew a lot  during the pregancy. I keep seeing all these pregnant bellied stick thin women who look like models from the back. They seem to be everywhere. From the back I look like a bar of soap or something. So wide and thick waisted and just yuck. My eyes skate over those stick pregant ladies’ bodies jealously. I have to avert my eyes to avoid giving them “the eye” or something. Blah. I hate getting fat. If I have to get fat I would like to say it was from eating foie gras and nutella and lasagna and stuffed parathas and delicious foods like that. Instead the width of my thighs is due to Ritz crackers,  cheapy faux croissants, pretzels, Kraft macaroni and cheese (the whole freakin box) and other nonsense food. I usually low carb a bit and exercise to keep myself in shape. I have to because I gain weight very easily. As seen when I stop low carbing for a couple of months. Sigh. Anyway, now that the nausea has subsided a bit, I intend to eat well, but more healthily.

My skin looks really bad, too. It really sucks. It looks like it’s gonna leave more purple scars, too. Sigh.

But I don’t feel as physically out of it as I did last time. With Lady D I spent the first trimester in a hormonal daze. This time I feel more clear headed and normal. Or maybe I never returned to my old self after Lady D, but have adjusted to being a ding-bat and just don’t notice it any more. But somehow I feel that I didn’t completely lose my clarity of thought like I did with the first trimester of Lady D’s gestation.

I feel okay aside from the nausea, though. I saw the fetus on ultrasound the other day. Subhanallah it was amazing. Its face was pretty clear and it looked like a cut little gnome or something.

Please remember me in your du’as on occasion.

So that’s my news.

 

 

What to say to Aunties?

I can get along with most anyone. I have friends from all corners of the earth. Some of my favorite people are very different from me. There is J., a white Zimbabwean woman. She is a sort-of Buddhist and a sometimes vegetarian. She is my mother’s age. She has a heart of gold, and she is hilarious. She says the funniest things and uses these vivid, humor tickling expressions that just have my sides splitting. There is G. She was one of my best friends in Oman, and now she lives not far from me. She is in her early 40’s. She is of Omani settled Bedouin origin but grew up in Kuwait. She is very lively, likes to tell funny stories, and is a great friend. I could go on and on. I have so many friends who are so different than me. I can be comfortable in my skin around people who are much older and from very diverse backgrounds. But there is a group that I can’t seem to get on with. That would be desi Aunties. When I play doe-eyed girl and act like a niece or beti or whatever, it all goes well. But when I try to talk to them like regular people and not Aunties, it doesn’t work. I seem too strange to them and we have no common ground to chat on. There are a lot of aunties in my neighborhood. Some of them have made an effort to get friendly, but I always do something weird and it scares them off. There is this Hyderbadi family down the street, and the Auntie sometimes comes over and tries to chat with me. One of her first questions when we met was “So what Indian serials do you watch?” I told her that I never watch Indian serials, I mostly watch BBC Food and the news. That killed her fun. We meet occasionally but all we talk about is the differences between Hyderbadi food and the desi food that I make (mostly my DH’s family’s U.P. type stuff, as well as Punjabi fare). I made some lasagna and sent it over to them, but they didn’t  like it (Hydro Auntie always informs me when they don’t like what I send). Anyway, the other day Hydro Auntie came over and I was cooking and had a bandanna tied over my hair to prevent my hair from picking up the food smell. She kept staring at my head in a weird way. After she left I went to the restroom and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was wearing a biker bandanna with skull and cross bones on it!!! I had forgotten! She must think I am a devil worshipper or something.

Anyway, I am not good at fake polite conversation with aunties. I just don’t know what to say. I am not trying to fit in with them, I am obviously a foreigner and all. I just wish I could gel better with them. They seem to appreciate homogeneity, and not like weird foreigners, from what I can tell. Another of my best friends is a real live Auntie (and she is visiting me in June, yay!) but she is different than most other aunties. She is kind of kooky and off-beat and funny. She also knows my family and knows the “real me,” with no pretensions. So we don’t go through all of the circles of formalities. But I think my problem is that I don’t know how to do these formalities.

I would like to know what kinds of things I should say to aunties so that I don’t sound like such a weirdo. I already learned a few things from the trenches: no skull and crossbones bandannas, don’t say I only watch the news. I am pretty well versed in cooking stuff, but beyond that, I get lost. What do desi aunties talk about? What can I do to move on from viewing them in a maternal auntie light, and view them more as peers?  Since I am married, aunties are my peers, right? Maybe that is my mistake, I should just keep thinking of them in a motherly way. I get invited to gatherings that I can’t avoid and I end up in a sea of aunties, so please someone give me a life raft of things that you think would be great to talk about with aunties. Otherwise I might drown in auntie sea turbulence one of these days.

 

Bang Gangerz

I have a certain fitnah, a struggle. Sometimes vanity overwhelms me and I feel like going out without a head scarf on. I never actually do it. But I just feel like it. I have been hijabi for years now. I can honestly say it doesn’t make much of a difference in my faith. I do it because it affirms my identity as a Muslim and because it embodies a stage of modesty that I like. In terms of outside social pressure and hijab, I feel that as a convert, hijab lends to Islamic credibility. It shouldn’t be that way and it is annoying as hell that that’s the way it is. But seriously, that’s the way it is. I have written a lot before (though never on this blog) about some challenges of hijab. There are positives, too. But this post is about negatives, I guess. It is hard as heck wearing it in the US. It otherizes you so much and makes people afraid of you. At best it can elicit patronizing politeness, but at worse hijab can elicit verbal abuse and even violence. It is also hard to wear it in the UAE. Many people here would like to keep mutahajibaat in a little box and not let them come out of it…there is job discrimination—it somehow causes the perception of “less professional,” there are assumptions made about you when you wear it. It is hard for me to wear it in Pakistan, too. Mainly because it is really hot and sticky in Karachi and it causes pimples to come out on my cheeks, but also because I think a lot of Pakistanis misunderstand hijab, or should I say that they have their own interpretation of it tied to class and so forth. Because of the heat, I often resort to the dupatta-scarf there. Anyhow, none of this puts me off of hijab so much as sheer vanity. In the UAE, the local cultural expression of head covering often involves a lot of dyed, styled hair showing from the front. I seriously don’t judge the girls and women who do that…they distinguish themselves from mutahajibaat and they are just cultural shayla wearers. To each her own. But that half-on half-off shayla look is infectious. In a way, it creates hijab fitnah for people who come over here from other Arab countries where the half-off half-on look is not practiced. So you see a lot of people getting into that look. I never do. Actually, I am more tempted just to take the dang thing off than I am to drape it on half way. Anyhow, today I saw a friend of mine and she had succumbed to the bang ganger look. She had her shayla slightly “ajar” and her bangs were sticking out. I said nothing. I generally avoid the inclination to give that well-meaning Islamic nasihah that some eager beavers so readily dole out. I think it is all personal and I don’t wanna stick my nose in her beeswax. I think seeing her struck me just because I feel the same need to look cute. It’s all vanity. Sheer vanity.

 

khas khas fiend

It is illegal to brink khas khas powder into the country. Khas khas powder is ground white poppy seeds. Apparently it is somehow possible to make opium with these seeds. My MIL brought me some khas khas powder here before. She is rather harmless looking so she never has her baggage searched. But it is known that bringing the oddest things into the country here can get you in trouble. Like codeine, for example. One can never be too cautious. Anyway, no more khas khas for me, I guess. Does anyone know if you can find this in markets in the US?

I wonder why we don’t get a buzz from a sprinkle of it in our koftay since apparently it is intoxicating. Weird. Just weird. 

 

Righteous Pizza

My parents were transplants from New York. I grew up in Central Texas. I was raised hearing about the culinary delights of New York and how redneckville was so lacking in such delights. The Chinese food was lame. The Italian food was non-existant. And the pizza, oh the sad pizza. My parents, especially my father pined for good NY-style pizza.

Eventually my hometown got really good Chinese food and pizza. It is still lacking in Italian restuarants. There are a couple, but still mediocre by US East Coast standards. But about the pizza:

At some point in my early childhood, a good pizza place moved in near us. It had excellent authentic NY-style pizza. Large, thin crusted, lightly sauced, slices of heaven. We got lucky.  We would often go there on Friday nights. We would order a giant pie and a pitcher of soda. We would fold and eat each slice. Yum.

Pizza, in my mind, is finger food. Just like sandwiches. I realize that there are some people who consume pizza with the aid of a fork and knife—in the US pizza utensil habits tend to be regional, and much of the world does the pizza with a fork thing. I find this sacriligeous. I realize that self-righteousness is a flaw. I suppose it is one of my many flaws. I am very self-righteous when it comes to pizza. Pizza with a fork! Ludicrous!

Funny thing, when I went with my husband’s large extended family to a rather tasty pizza joint in Pakistan (that’s right, you CAN get decent pizza in Pakistan, why not?) I looked up from having been engrossed in my slice, and noticed that I was the only one eating pizza with my hands. Everyone else was daintily sawing away at their slices with a knife and properly popping bites into their mouths with the aid of a fork. I mentioned this to my husband. He started eating his slice with his hands just so I wouldn’t look so weird. (anyway I always look so weird no matter what I do in Pakistan…it is my destiny as a pardesi.)

Any average American who has travelled abroad and dined with foreigners immediately becomes conscious of our bad table manners. Jordanians, Chinese, Omanis, you name it, they generally have much higher expectations of table manners than us when eating Western food. No matter if some of these people generally eat rice with their hands. Local food is one thing, and there is much etiquette with hand and chopstick use as well. But when one is eating a Western dish, one must graciously use formal protocol. I work with a lot of British people and they put me to shame for my manners. I have a good childhood friend who moved to England to marry a boyfriend. We both expressed our feelings of being embarrassed when we realized how bad our manners looked to others in our new environments. Sometimes I seriously feel like I probably look like some wild monkey hunched over my plate as I smack the food into my pie-hole. Like I might look up any moment and give a primal scream.

I try hard to eat in a more refined way these days just because I don’t want to look like a mannerless stooge. But it is still hard and unnatural for me.

I won’t, however, compromise on my pizza habits. I am sorry, but pizza is for the hands! If I am gonna eat pizza with a fork I might as well use chopsticks for icecream.

 

No I do not

I do not wear a bikini under my many veils. Just to make that clear.

 I sometimes hear stories of sightings of women who wear hoochie shorts under open abayas. Never seen it though. You know who is telling those stories and it ain’t us.  I admit I have seen some bad taste. Knee length skirts and capri pants and killer pointy boots and loads of make-up and even cleavage. Abaya-fied. Mostly at the mall. But I have never actually heard of someone regularly wearing a bikini under her abaya just for the heck of it.

Who makes this shit up?

You know who. Because we are so oppressed, you see stories about how we resist our oppression by showing the front of our hair. Maybe it ain’t that at all. The women who do that are not covering for religious reasons. They are covering for cultural reasons. Or maybe they started covering when they were more gung-ho about everything, but over time they aren’t so into it all anymore and they just don’t care about a few hairs here and there. But they still believe in the basics.

And the bikinis? The veiled flowers are modest but secretly sexy. Waiting to be unwrapped. Or they are huge hypocrites. People just love pointing out others’ hypocracies. Think they are so holy but they are wearing what very few women would dare to wear in public, all underneath. Or maybe it is a form if resistance to authority. See, ha ha ha! You try to control my sexuality from the male gaze, but I ain’t having it! I am gonna flaunt it to spite you! But really, I have never seen or heard of it, the bikini sporting abaya clad woman.

I have never been to Saudi. Or Iran. I can’t talk about or for them places. But I can just say that in my daily life as an authentic Muslim woman living in a Muslim majority country, I really ain’t never seen or heard of no one wearing a bikini to school under her abaya. That is just sensational nonsense.

 

Example of language gaps referenced in previous post

I was looking out of the window at our little patio yesterday with my toddler. I said to her in Urdu, “Look, there is a birdie. She has come to drink water from that little hole. She must be thirsty.” After the bird drank some water, it started to fluff up its feathers…it looked very puffy and cute with its feathers all standing up. It was like birdie goosebumps. I wanted to say, “look how the bird is fluffing her feathers.” I had NO idea how to say that. How do you say puffing up or fluffing? If I were to try, it would come out all wrong. I would probably had said that the bird was “swelling up” because that is the only similar verb which I can think of. I just said nothing.

 I also noticed that my daughter’s ear was a little bit red. I said to the nanny, does D’s ear seem red to you? We peeked in her ear and we saw a little pimple. The nanny said, I see a little pimple inside her ear, can you see its “beak.” She meant that the pimple has a pointed crusty scab, but she didn’t know how to say “scab,” so she said “beak.” It did look like a beak, but that isn’t the correct word. I don’t know how to say pointy crusted scab, either. I would probably use some other words to convey that like “a spot with dried blood and pus.” Neither of us really know how to say the correct words because we are not native speakers. Sometimes we talk in long roundabout ways trying to explain things because of this.

So this is the kind of broken and inaccurate language input that my daughter receives.

In addition to that, there are many problems with my grammar. Like if I were to say a complex sentence in Urdu during natural speech, I sometimes forget to carry the gender or the plurality or the formality (hain/hai) all the way to the end of the sentence. The nanny does, too. I can hear that it is inaccurate the minute I say it. But for some reason I don’t get it right at the moment of production because my mouth is moving faster than my brain.

Children learn to speak by listening and processing rules with generalizations about structure. So what structure is she picking up from us because we are often inconsistent?Sometimes correct, sometimes not.

 

We aren’t exactly wolves, but…what do you think?

Do you know what a feral child is? Linguists take a special interest in the phenomenon because it reveals a lot about language aquisition in babies and small children. Children who grow up in socially isolated conditions and do not receive regular language modeling have irreparable linguistic and intellectual deficits.

I was thinking about something recently. My family’s language situation is a social experiment in someways. My 15 month old daughter’s main language models, me and A., the nanny, speak non-native Urdu/Hindi. My native language is English, but I speak Urdu fairly well. My accent, stress, and intonation are quite good (told that my accent sounds native…cuz i am cool like that ), and I speak the language comfortably. However, there are many faults in my Urdu: I use the wrong gender sometimes, I sometimes make mistakes with plurals, and also make some other Urdu/Hindi specific mistakes. I also have some gaps in my lexicon. In some ways you could say I am fluent when it comes to daily life drudgery stuff, but with sophisticated concepts, etc., I rely on English to support the expression of my ideas.  A., the nanny, is a native speaker of Yolmo, which is a Sino-Tibetan language, but she started learning Hindi in her pre-teen years and speaks it very well, as she lived submerged in a Hindi language environment for over 20 years. I think she has a deeper lexicon than I do, but she also has lexical gaps in certain situations. Her pronunciation and stress are pretty good, with some errors common to Urdu/Hindi speakers who are from the Sino-Tibetan region of Nepal. She is actually worse with gender than I am, and also makes other grammar mistakes.  My husband’s native languages are English and Urdu. We usually mix the two when we speak to each other. He is the only 100% fluent Urdu language model for my daughter in our home environment. However, because of work, he spends the least time with our daughter, especially on weekdays. He often only sees her for 2 waking hours per day. According to research on language development, it doesn’t matter if the primary caregiver of a child speaks broken language as long as the child has accurate language modeling in the environment. Children actually pick up language from their peer groups, at school, and in the larger environment, which is why children don’t necessarily have the same accent as their parents, or why a US immigrant parent who speaks broken English with the kids has children who become fluent English speakers.

My concern is this: since we live in the UAE, my daughter does not have a full, thriving authentic Urdu/Hindi language environment. With the exception of her father, everyone around her speaks somewhat broken Urdu/Hindi. She plays often with our Gujarati neighbors, their Hindi is broken. Our other neighbors are Pakistani Punjabis. The adults don’t speak Urdu fluently, and their kids mix English and Punjabi and don’t speak Urdu very well (there is a lot of language hodge-podge in Dubai, the whole place is one big linguistic experiment!) The nanny’s best friends are a Bangladeshi woman and a Goan Indian woman. They come over often during the day and my daughter is exposed to conversations between all of us in our slightly accented, somewhat broken language. Our Urdu/Hindi language errors are all different because none of us speak the same first language. With the exception of our time spent in Pakistan, my daughter is never surrounded by 100% accurate models.  Luckily, the nanny and I both picked up our Urdu/Hindi in a very Punjabi-fied environment, so we both use aap + ho constructions, and also use some Punjabi lexicon (belly button is tunni!), stuff like that. A. is also very adept with language and she quickly picked up a lot of Urdu-specific language and uses that with us in place of Hindi stuff…khwaab instead of sapna, stuff like that. So there is some consistency. Aside from that, there are many inconsistencies. I wonder what structural rules my daughter will internalize. What will her accent be? How will this situation affect her linguistic and cognitive development? Could this possibly damage my daughter because the building blocks of her linguistic and intellectual development are broken blocks?

Inshallah I am planning to send her to nursery in the Fall. She’ll pick up English there. I am not worried at all about her English. I do use English with her sometimes, but mostly it is all Urdu because I know she will get English later. Except songs. Most of our songs are in English…I mean, I’m a Little Teapot, Twinkle Twinke Little Star. I know Chota Sa MakoRa…I really don’t know any Urdu nursery rhymes and can’t remember the few I have heard correctly. I know I should be singing in Urdu, too. I guess. I think my husband and I just assumed that our daughter would be bilingual…we expect that she will eventually lose a lot of Urdu later when we relocate to the US. But I think we just kind of presumed that since we spoke Urdu to her, she would learn Urdu. But when I assess our environment, it seems more complex than that.

I don’t know. What do you think? Did any of you choose to raise your children in a language that is not your native tongue with the intention that they would eventually grow to be bilingual? What was your speech environment like? Anyone in a situation like mine? Please ask around because I would really like to know what to expect. She does have a good vocabulary for a 15 month old (mashallah, chashm-e-bad door!). Most of it is Urdu, plus some English words commonly said by desis like light. She shows understanding of the Urdu spoken to her. But maybe since my daughter’s language environment is not one of complete fluency, I should just speak to her exclusively in English. I just don’t know. At least that way she would be getting at least one model of completely accurate language. Not that I don’t never make no mistakes or nothing, but ya know what I mean.