If You Are Expecting Your First Child...

You must read this.

- Shreeprakash Sharma

Unlike her expectations and much-heard fantasies from her college friends, the post married life for Swati proved to be what we may call the worst nightmare for her. Now there was a complete Uturn from her otherwise pre-married blissful life and, more than anything else, she was very confused and perplexed when the so-called heavenly days of honeymoon were over. The most formidable challenge before the poor lady was how to spend the leisure time which she had aplenty after her husband would leave for his duties. Anyhow the days went on passing and she also kept on learning the modus operandi of coping with what married life had unleashed ahead.

On a fateful morning when she got up from her bed to go to the kitchen for preparing breakfast for her husband, she started having very surreal feelings of nausea and dizziness. Unaware of what she had been undergoing, Swati got fearful and very aghast at what was going to happen. Her husband took her to his family gynaecologist.

When Prateek was told that his wife was two months pregnant her happiness knew no bounds. There was an atmosphere of frenzy in the couple’s house. Both of them started dreaming and fantasising the arrival of the much-awaited guest the socio familial ritual of marriage is supposed to bring about on Earth.

But this ecstasy of happiness of becoming the mother for the first time proved to be ephemeral, especially for Swati. With each passing day Swati went on getting nervous and depressed. There was no other person to assist her in carrying through the various domestic activities. She felt utterly anxious and her mental status dampened her happiness, the like of which she had not ever gone through earlier.