Re: Are you trying?
I know exactly how you feel, and I totally agree with everything you said. LOL, love the “Hey I just met you…”
I hate this aspect of our desi culture. People feel they are entitled to your personal details and information about your private live. I’ve had many people (mostly community members, not relatives) at gatherings, or religious events, ask me about this. Most are just the usual type of “when are you going to have a baby?” Which I can smile and ignore, or say “pray for me” and forget about. But there have been a few really intrusive ones.
This one lady, a couple years older than myself, but got married a few years after I did. She and I say salaam to each other at community events, but we’re not friends, we don’t even have each others’ phone numbers. She came up to me and very confidently said, “Hey, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but are you pregnant?” I politely replied, “No, why do you ask?” And she goes, “Well some of us were talking, and we were looking at the way you’re walking, how you’re standing, and I said she’s definitely pregnant… Don’t get offended, I’m the kind of person who’ll just ask straight up, I don’t like contemplating things when I can just go and find out.”
I didn’t say anything to her then, assured her I wasn’t pregnant. Afterwards, I felt angry… Who does this woman think she is? Lets assume I actually was pregnant, and I haven’t announced it to the community for whatever reason, maybe the first trimester isn’t over and I want to make sure everything is okay before I start going around to inform everyone… What right does this person have to know news that I have not given out yet? She’s not my best friend, not my relative, not even anyone remotely close!
On the other hand, I’m okay with my mother, MIL, or aunts (directly related, not the “aunties” of the community) advising me to have kids and not wait forever. They don’t ask me when I’m going to have a baby, they say I should have one now that I’ve been married for several years and that I shouldn’t wait till I’m too old. I can tolerate this.
However, some other relatives can be quite annoying too. A couple of older cousins, just because they have one or two kids now and have been married for a few years more than I have, talk and act like they’re experts on everything in life. One even sat me down and gave me a lecture for over an hour, which included everything from how I’m going to feel when I hold my baby, how it will help with relations with my husband, to a horror story of one of her own friends who waited too long and couldn’t have a baby (and tragically died in childbirth along with her baby when she was finally able to conceive at the age of 40).
I tolerated her stupid lecture with a smile on my face, thinking to myself that she has good intentions. But The icing on the cake? After the stupid lecture was over, this cousin (who happens to be only 3 years older than me) realized she might’ve got a little to far. So she said to me, "I hope I haven’t offended you… Don’t pay attention to me, I was just rambling… I don’t give a **** about what you do with your life, I don’t care, do what you want to… I was just talking, " etc. To which I was thinking, “but you think its okay to waste my time with your stupid ramblings when you don’t even care about me?”
Why do people think they’re entitled to dump their opinions on others? It baffles me because I have lots of opinions (many negative ones about the stupid things I see others doing) and I keep them to myself because I KNOW they’d be offended if I give them advice. Its so annoying when people dump their crappy opinions on others, then qualify it with something dumb like “Please don’t be offended.”