Ch. 18: Empathy

Fellow pregnant women take to each other eagerly, with a knowing look and an empathy for the aches and discomforts collectively experienced, no matter what culture, race or religion.

Today I experienced this shared compassion while shuffling/waddling about the glorious avenues of The Atlantis Hotel on The Palm Dubai. Muddling along, too, was a woman of extreme beauty, eyes smoky with pitch perfect khol, who noticed me first. She smiled with the only parts of her showing, her eyes, proclaimed not with words but with gestures that she, too, is pregnant. Only then did I look upon her belly and indeed, beneath her abaya, covered with swathes of fabric – a bump!

The Aussie and the Kuwaiti - both knocked up, @ The Atlantis Hotel, The Palm, Dubai

The Aussie and the Kuwaiti – both knocked up, @ The Atlantis Hotel, The Palm, Dubai

That instant: a bond. No unifying words required; no announcements of how “far along” we either of us are. Covered only on the outside, and not in her outlook, this beauty and I spent the next half hour “discussing” our pregnancies not so much with phrases, but with derivative emotions and gestures.

Whether from Kuwait or from Australia, the miracle of conception is still indeed a miracle event that is rewarded with the tenderness of strangers.

 

 

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