When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I just knew it would be a girl. It was of course possible that I wanted a girl so bad that I refused to entertain opposing thoughts. I was right. My second girl was different. One moment I would think it was a girl, the next one I would be craving mutura or roast maize and the smell of petrol, and change my mind because what girl craves that?

I may have had doubts about the gender of my second daughter, but my village women had no such qualms to deal with. Too often they would give me unsolicited gender reveal. They would look at my bulging stomach, squint at it for a few seconds, sometimes cock their heads, nod and say, 'that's a girl.' I have enough experience with village women and their unscientific predictions about stuff, their audacity to be right can be annoying, so even with the mutura and petrol cravings, I was not surprised when I popped another female.

How are the village wise women able to be seers like that? Apparently, male foetuses are kind of pointed, like they want to tear through the umbilical cord for exit, while the female ones are spread evenly. "Boys will be boys - disorganised, even when they are in the womb," one of the told me with a dismissive sweep of her hand.

Obviously, I could have found out the gender from the hospital scans, but I was not interested and every time the doctor offered to tell me, I would decline. It was nice not knowing, and I wanted to be left with something to be excited about after birth.

How things have changed. The first time I read a social media headline 'gender reveal party', what I wondered was why anyone would hold a party to tell us their sexual orientation. You cannot blame me, I am a villager. Now that I know what it is, I am no less confused about the purpose. It is now mainstream and the stakes are getting higher with cake designs, dress codes and I even saw a gender reveal party where guests in the garden had to crane their necks upwards as a helicopter flew by, spraying them with pink powder that left them looking pink-ridiculous. It was a girl, and pink guests cheered and clicked glasses and hugged the mother to be, one a village woman would tell not to buy pink stuff because her pregnancy looked male.

I knew things were getting out of hand when I saw a local celebrity charging guests to attend such a party. Why, I asked myself, could those guests not wait a couple of months to find out? It is not like the rest of us do not now know what gender the baby is. I don't understand, but I am also at that age that I do not understand a lot of things that young people do. Right in front of my eyes, I have become my mother, and it is both amusing and scary.

When I was little, I grew up seeing women hiding their pregnancies like they were state secrets, or an ugly scar. I saw them wear hideous nightdress-like outfits when they ventured out there. I saw them walk, their eyes fixed to the ground in front of them, because they were afraid that people with 'bad' eyes out would jinx their pregnancies. If these women did not have to go out in public, they did not.

Then came my generation that shocked our mother's generation. We refused to wear 'bad' pregnancy fashion. We still went to the salon. We went out dancing. We wore heels, revealing outfits - we were the baddest pregnant women, and it traumatised those ahead of us.

Now we are the traumatised ones, and I can finally understand my mother's shock. Pregnancies are no longer sacred - they are for the public to consume and have an opinion about. We have pregnant women posing naked for photos, and posting those photos online for the world to see, and although I think the photos are beautiful, especially considering that I hated my pregnant body and refused to take any photos, I feel slightly uncomfortable.

Generation gaps are the most lethal character development tools.

- thevillager254@gmail.com