This post has the following content warnings:
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Naima is having a baby!
It's not her first time having a baby. Obviously. But it's her first time having a baby with Elie, and that's its own kind of momentous. There are some ways in which she's grown out of normal Osirian gender roles, sure, but this, after all, is the core of them, the core of what it is to be a woman. Given that, it's probably unsurprising that she still has all of the usual feelings of pride about her ability to bear children for her husband. She knows that's not quite how he's thinking of it, but she thinks (hopes) that he still has something analogous to the way that Osirian men feel about their wives bearing their children, and that he'll be happy and proud and impressed with her for doing this objectively very impressive thing.
It's important that people feel this sort of pride about having children, of course, for all of the usual reasons that one ought to be able to feel pride in their work. It inspires people to continue doing the best job they can. This is most obviously important for parenting children who have already been born, but it's important for pregnancy, too! And Naima, given the enormous amount of pride that she takes in all of her work, including this work, is going to do a really good job. She's going to make sure to eat a carefully balanced diet and not leave her nutrition to her ring of sustenance, which might or might not be enough to support two creatures, one of them growing very rapidly, without any negative effects on either. She's going to be careful to avoid foods that are generally agreed to cause malformed or weak babies (like sugar cane, tea, acidic foods, and alcohol). She's going to cast remove disease and her regenerative hex on the fetus every day to ensure that it doesn't catch anything that might kill it or cause any problems for its development. She's going to get enough rest (although there, she is going to trust her ring of sustenance; it would cost too many other babies too much if she were to go back to spending an additional six hours sleeping every day). And she's obviously not going to have sex with her husband, no matter how annoying this particular requirement may be; it's well-known that sex during mid to late pregnancy can lead to a miscarriage or a stillbirth, which would be disastrous, since you can't bring a child back to life if it dies before it's taken its first breath.
Really, of course, proper Osirian women aren't supposed to decide when they have sex with their husbands anyway, either by acting like they have the final authority on the matter or by needling their husbands into making some particular decision. And Naima doesn't! She's not that crass! But it's not like she doesn't send signals. Everyone probably sends signals. Naima's not very good at subtlety, so her signal is mostly taking off her clothes without any discussion or warning that might constitute needling someone. It has not escaped her notice that this usually works pretty well at getting the desired result.
Anyway. She's going to stop doing that. Presumably it wouldn't matter if she did, since it hasn't occurred to her that the badness of sex during pregnancy might not be common knowledge in other places, so Elie must know it too, and therefore he would just ignore her. But there's no point in sending the signal in the first place if you know it's going to be ignored, and it also seems rude to deliberately tempt someone with something they can't have right now. So. No more signals.
It does not at any point occur to her that this change in behavior might be at all confusing, or that Elie might be confused about the causes behind any frustration that happens to leak through about it.
