Five years of marriage, and now a heartbeat under my ribs. No mother down the hall to guide me through it. Just me, my growing belly, and a paperback with a cartoon stork on the cover — What to Expect When Expecting — dog-eared and underlined like scripture, the closest thing I had to a village.
My husband never came to a single checkup. Not out of neglect — back home, husbands simply didn’t. Waiting rooms in Pakistan were built for women and their mothers, not for men in ties. So I sat alone on the crinkling paper of exam tables in a country I still didn’t fully understand, translating my own body’s language with no one to hold my hand through it.
And underneath the fluorescent lights, an old fear followed me from Karachi to Florida — the kind whispered by aunties over tea, passed down like a family recipe nobody asked for: think positive, and you’ll have a son. Think dark thoughts, and the universe punishes you with a daughter.
I had grown up watching what it cost to be born a girl there. The apologies muttered at her birth. The dowries counted like debts. The doors quietly closed to her before she’d even learned to walk. So some nights, lying in the dark with my hand on my belly, I caught myself praying — not for health, not for happiness — but for a boy. And then hating myself for it.
But America didn’t ask what my baby would be born as before deciding what she was worth. Here, a daughter wasn’t a burden to be married off before she became inconvenient. Here, a girl could study, could argue, could leave a room without asking permission. The superstition I carried across an ocean began to lose its grip, word by word, page by page, checkup by checkup I attended alone but never really alone — because somewhere in that borrowed apartment, a different kind of inheritance was quietly rewriting itself.
Then she arrived. My daughter, placed on my chest still slick and warm, covered in the waxy film of her first minutes on earth, screaming her arrival into a room full of strangers who felt, in that instant, like family. I cried — not because I’d been handed a burden the world had trained me to expect, but because of the sheer strength radiating off her tiny, furious body. She had survived me. She had survived the fear I carried across an ocean before she even had a name.
I made her a promise in that hospital bed, quiet and fierce: I would protect her from every superstition that tried to shrink her. I would guide her toward becoming exactly what I never dared imagine for myself — a woman who leads instead of apologizes for taking up space.
That was my Cheeky way of unlearning a curse — one checkup, one page, one prayer, one promise at a time.
