A Muslim's Romantic Journey

Chapter 56.

Safia’s POV

The morning sickness was getting worse and worse. It was so hard to try and keep anything down. Yusuf didn’t make it much easier for me. He kept forcing food down my throat. I know he was being thoughtful and he was thinking of our child but it was annoying. And I’d end up puking out most of what I ate.

Sometimes I’d puke on an empty stomach. That meant that all that would come out was bile. It was gross. I hadn’t even become a mother yet but I was already starting to feel indebted to my mum. Did she have to go through all this too? Not only her, but all mothers!

However, my sickness got better when I was at university. I thought of it as Allah making my life a little easier. It was sort of like a miracle to me. I hadn’t told any of my classmates about my pregnancy, but a few people had said I seemed different.

Two months after I found out the news that I was having a baby, it was time for my ultrasound. For the first time, I was going to see an image of my child! Yusuf was really excited about it too.

The wait in the waiting room felt even longer than the last two months. Finally they called us in.

“I can’t wait to see it! If you don’t mind me asking, when can we know the gender?” I asked the nurse. I was a lot more chatty than usual. It must have been my eagerness to see my baby.

“That will be in another couple of months I think.” She replied. Then she told me to lie down on a bed. She went through a process which included some cold gel being applied where the baby was.

The nurse was talking to me but I was spacing out, staring at the screen, waiting to get a glimpse of my child. An image came but it was all blurred. Trying to work out what was on the screen, I hadn’t realized the sound I was hearing. It was my child’s heartbeat.

“Yusuf! Do you hear that?” I gripped his hand.

“It sounds weird.” He replied. It kind of did. Why was it irregular and so fast? Then a clearer image came up in the screen. I stopped talking and stared at it in awe, ignoring what the nurse was saying. But then I caught the words ‘congratulations’ and ‘twins’ and suddenly, nothing else the nurse said made any sense.

I was having twins?

“I’ll leave you alone for a moment.” The nurse said, exiting the room. When she left, I looked over at Yusuf whose mouth was hanging wide as he stared at the screen.

“Twins.” He said. He stared harder at the screen. “How can she even tell?”

“Never mind that, how on earth are we having twins? Isn’t there like a twin gene that runs through a family to get twins. I haven’t got any twins in my family.” I asked, starting to make out the images on the screen.

“I’m pretty sure that’s a myth. Besides, didn’t you once tell me your mum had aunts who were twins?”

“Oh yeah.” I looked back at the screen. “That’s a head! That’s definitely one of their heads! Then that’s probably a hand or something.” I pointed to different parts of the image.

“And there’s the other one. I’m pretty sure. The thing that looks like a peanut,” Yusuf said making me giggle.

“I’m having twins.” I couldn’t believe it.

“We are having twins.” He corrected.

“No, I am. You’re not the one suffering like I am and you’re not the one that has to go through labour. Therefore, only I’m the one having the twins.”

“That’s not fair! I’m not completely useless. After all, I had something to do with that too.” He said, pointing to the image of our babies. There was a knock on the door before the nurse entered again. She gave us some information and told us about our next appointment. I wasn’t listening properly. I was too busy thinking about there being two children. I’m sure Yusuf was listening for me.