Reluctant secret keeper
Maán Jalal shares how he was once subject to one too many unwanted confidences
FIVE MONTHS ago, a close friend of mine called me with amazing news. Only moments before she’d seen a straight blue line that told her that she was pregnant. Ecstatic beyond belief the said friend was, like most couples who were trying for their first pregnancy, apprehensive that it might be difficult. Thankfully it wasn’t. We talked for some time about the amazing news which included potential baby names and what the baby’s star sign could be. Two hours later, another close friend called. Upset, close to tears and anxious, she told me that she was pregnant – her third pregnancy in the last five years. We discussed why this was good news, and that three children under five might be a handful but worth it in the end. I know all the mothers reading this are probably thinking I’m a bit ignorant about what it means to really have three children under five, but what else am I supposed to say? In any case, after some discussion on the topic, friend number two ended the call with the same request friend number one had. ‘Please don’t say anything to anyone! This is a secret and you’re one of the few people who know.’
Of course, I thought. It usually took three months for expectant mothers to share the news publicly. Not a problem, I could keep a secret. Now, I have to preface by saying that friend one and friend two know each other but aren’t good friends, so it is unlikely, unfortunately for me, that they would be sharing the news with each other. A week later after this double dose of news I’m supposed to keep a secret, I got a call from friend one. Complaining of extreme nausea to the point that she wasn’t able to even cook herself and husband a simple meal, she asked if it wasn’t too much trouble if I would bring over some of my mother’s food. Of course, I said, not a problem! A few hours later, friend two called and in what seemed like a weird practical joke, she had the same request. It seems that the smell of any food made her feel ill and she was craving home cooked Arabic food – would it be possible if I could bring over a dish from my mother’s kitchen? Yeah… sure!
Fast forward to me at home, creating an elaborate story to my mother where somehow two of my friends both had food poisoning from the same restaurant. And although I had eaten at the same restaurant with them, ordered a completely different dish which was the reason why I wasn’t ill. Mother was more than happy to make a little extra food which I then packed away in Tupperware containers which I then distributed in the evening to pregnant friends like a Deliveroo driver.
One would think that that would be it. But not. Over the next few weeks, I was getting phone calls from each friend complaining or discussing the same topics surrounding their pregnancies. Baby gender, baby names, due dates, birth methods, baby clothes, baby blah blah blah blah – a month later I was so baby-d out with information, I couldn’t care about that I was starting to avoid their calls. The problem was that I was getting extremely confused by who had told me what piece of information and I had a number of times almost revealed that the other was pregnant. I was stressing not over one pregnancy but two!
Finally, I saw a light at the end of the tunnel when friend one called me to tell me that she had got an appointment with a wellknown doctor on March 15 at 11.30am where hopefully the gender of the baby would be revealed. Great, I said with forced enthusiasm. Then friend two called and told me that they had also had booked an appointment with the same doctor. What date I asked? March 15. What time I asked, gripping my hair in apprehension. 12pm.
I convinced friend two to go to their appointment early, at least 15 minutes just in case and then called friend one and told them that it would be a good idea if she asked the doctor a whole series of complicated questions to put her mind at ease and not use Google as a go-to source. My plan was that hopefully, if it all worked out, friend one and two would bump into each other, the secret would be revealed and I would be free! Well as luck, or whatever the opposite of luck is would have it, despite all of this they somehow missed each other on the day! I had to endure two more months of this back and forth baby talk until finally when both were given the all clear, I told each one about the other and asked them both to never tell me a secret ever again.