Being Pregnant Out of Wedlock

The moon hovered over Etna’s outstretched Western arm lighting up the black night as I sat outside my friend’s modest home on her front outdoor patio intently listening to her struggle as a single pregnant woman living in the small Sicilian town of Maniace.

A cricket’s chirp filled in the silent gaps of our conversation. My friend got pregnant out of wedlock. Her boyfriend and she have been together for several years, with the intentions to marry, but the baby to be was an unplanned pleasant surprise.

“I know everyone is talking about me, but what they say about me is happening in their own family.”

In a town where reputation is everything, a family will do anything to save face in public when something in their private life happens that is considered a disgrace. My friend told me how those who threw the knives are now on the receiving end of the daggers.

The whispers, the looks and the underneath conversations eventually make it back to the person who broke one of the Sicilian codes. My friend did not do anything to cover up her pregnancy. Unlike those who criticized her, she did not rush to the altar nor did she insist on a ring from her boyfriend.

The family that scorned her not only insisted their pregnant daughter marry the father of the soon-to-be-born child, “they filled out all the marriage documents on the father’s behalf,” she told me. “Now they are having a wedding in September so that she will not look pregnant.”

I always ask the questions that I know many Sicilians would not directly ask the person whom they are inquiring about. Instead they ask other’s in the town. Everyone knows she is pregnant. It is something one cannot hide. But to actually discuss with her how she feels about being pregnant without being married maybe considered taboo.

Maybe she was thinking how dare I ask if she was on the pill; how did it happen; how did she tell her mom; does she want to get married? I think I would be standoffish if someone was prying in my business; however, I was just trying to understand how she was dealing with living in a town that kept up mentalities that are extinct in the modern world.

Maybe she is just appeasing me and will go behind my back and tell everyone in town that I was being nosey asking questions about things that are considered very private. In the end I think she was relieved to speak openly. I noticed that she never left her house. It was then that I realized that this summer she never accepted my offers to get breakfast together or to take I walk. She didn’t say that she was ashamed to be seen pregnant. She didn’t have to.