Why is it that websites about motherhood all assume that you're either American or British? Probably because the authors are based in the US or Britain, I know, but they also seem to reflect no understanding that cultural differences count for a whole lot when it comes to parenting and division of labor between spouses.

Why do I gripe about this? Because there seems to be precious little "out there" to help the poor benighted PakAmeristaniMom. Being the "mixed up product of a conservative upbringing and a liberal education" has its downside. Your brain stops accepting the patterns that you begin to emulate instinctively, so you overthink every little thing. Like whether you're going to sew a button on your husband's shirt, or act as if it would be a betrayal of every feminist nerve in your body. And, no, it doesn't help that I can see the humor in the situation. Remember the whole scene about the blender as a gift from the Steve Martin version of "Father of the Bride"?

More seriously though, with a baby in the picture, the frame shifts dramatically. As all parents know, and keep trying to tell you, even as they accept that you will never truly understand this until you are a parent yourself.

So here I am, surrounded by people telling me, no, taking it for granted, that my career will now take a back seat. And a part of me thinks I should be grateful, because employers here are truly much more understanding of the pressures on new mothers. But the price you pay for that understanding is that your career is taken less seriously. You are automatically out of the running for a lot of things.

I have it relatively easier, simply because of being a teacher. My friend the physicist is agonized because she is struggling in an all male preserve with her first faculty position, in a field where falling behind for a year means you're out of the race. My friend the lawyer no longer practices law, because she's too busy managing her home and husband and kids. Instead, she's started up a business organizing upscale children's birthday parties. How does someone who fought her father tooth and nail on her decision to go to law school just ditch it for kiddie birthday parties? At least the physicist friend relates to my dilemma. Everyone else just seems to assume that the answer is obvious. (Give up your job; stay at home and take care of the kid(s)).

I am getting tired of resenting my situation, even as I am incredibly grateful for the wonder that is my son. It ticks me off no end that men can have a career and a family, no problem, but that women do not enjoy that sheer simplicity.

More on this later. The gripe could be unending...

So maybe the fears about the Virginia Tech shooter being linked to Islam by the media weren't totally unfounded after all...how idiotic can you get?

People who are sitting in the US and watching the news about Pakistan (I don't know how many there are, but I'd guess the number has increased substantially in the past six years), must think we're completely crazy. Of course, people sitting in Pakistan, watching the news about the US (and there's a substantially larger percentage of those), also think we're crazy. I, of course, have the dubious privilege of being able to say 'we' when referring to the Pakistani people or the American people.

University violence in Pakistan is usually related to one of two things. Either some professor is getting roughed up for not giving in to a thug's demand that he get away with using unfair means, or it's inter-party political violence. The idea that someone would walk in to a university classroom and randomly start shooting is quite alien, even though we're used to gun-related violence, otherwise. Plus, of course, everyone is now breathing a sigh of relief that the shooter was not Pakistani, or Muslim.

For my part, I've never understood why it's so easy to forget the humanity of those involved in a tragedy like this, just because it happens to be a tragedy at some geographical and cultural distance.

On the side of the globe where I currently reside, we're dealing with crises of a larger magnitude in terms of political significance. We have a government that is probably fomenting anarchy, just to make itself seem more indispensable to its Western allies. With a Democratic Congress, our resident military dictator will be worried. What better than to make it look like the capital is under siege by religious fanatics who look like ninjas? Before you start dismissing this as a conspiracy theory, consider the fact that this seminary and mosque is walking distance from the Pakistani military's intelligence headquarters, and has been illegally constructed on government property.

In fact, the conflict technically started when the government said it wanted its land back. The seminary and mosque have been there for years; convenient time to decide to dismantle mosques in the capital.

If you don't follow the news in Pakistan, then you have no clue what I'm talking about. Briefly, since October, a bunch of burq-clad seminary students have occupied a children's library connected (physically, not institutionally) with the seminary. This was supposed to be in protest of the government's drive to dismantle mosques that have been erected by encroaching illegally on to other people's, or the government's, property.

Such construction is completely illegal, of course, from the perspective of secular as well as religious law. Tearing down mosques is completely unacceptable from a religious point of view, but only if they are 'legitimate' mosques. That the organization or individual building and/or running the mosque should have legal possession of the land on which it is built is a prerequisite to this legitimacy.

So what is actually happening is that a bunch of college-aged students are up in arms over an issue that they don't appear to understand fully. Sound familiar? My Oberlin days were full of situations like that. The difference being that Oberlin students don't tend to violence.

So some people worry about posting twice in a day. Here I am, lucky if I get around to writing once a year. Oh well. Maybe I can manage once a week for the next month. How's that for a goal?

And so we duck for cover, take a deep breath, and plunge into making sense of the madness that has descended upon us.

The Pakistani people have given with open hearts. And yet the distribution bottleneck means that up north in Kashmir and the NWFP, people are starving, and wet, and cold. There are no tents to be found in the city of Lahore. We can only hope this means that they are already on their way up north. The more cynical amongst us fear that it's more a case of hoarding to drive the prices up. A tent usually costs about Rs 4000 (that's roughly $65). Right now, they aren't to be had for Rs. 15000. Manufacturers say that they are working as hard as they can.

In the meanwhile, the winter descends in the mountains, and the 2.5 million who are homeless have already had to contend with hailstorms. Hailstorms severe enough that the camp set up in the grounds of one of the nation's better medical colleges simply collapsed under the force of the storm. Then there's the rain.

Then of course, there is the mounting anger, and simple, human, desperation of those who are starving while transporters gouge those who attempt to send donations north. Odd people, us humans. So noble, so mean.

6th graders at my school gave up their lunch money at the first announcement that the school was starting a fund. The premises look like a relief camp. It's affords me a great deal of pleasure to see overprivileged young Pakistani women organizing, mostly on their own, mountains of goods that have come in, pellmell, from families and friends of students.

This isn't particularly coherent. But my thoughts simply aren't that right now...

How could I fail to write about the brilliant erudition of President Mush. Maybe being in Washington does that these days. The Bush effect. No president may make sense while speaking in the US...?

So our dictatorial tendencies are beginning to show. No longer quite so media-savvy. No longer quite as forthright as on the 12th of October 1999. Six years can do that to a person, I suppose. So dissent has become anti-Pakistan. Criticism of human rights abuses has only one explanation: the critics are out to get Pakistan. Bah!

And of course I take it far more personally just because he was talking about rape. There's a kind of relief in him having made that statement publicly. However embarrassing it is that the head of state of the country I currently live in holds such asinine views, I have to admit that he isn't the only one holding those views. It's interesting to see a public reaction to the kind of views about which a lot of Pakistanis have no clue that they are incredibly offensive.

It's another reminder of how uncomfortable Pakistan, as a nation, is with the women's rights movement. And no, it's not because of Islam. The world of Islam has become extraordinarily sexist, but it's also classist, racist, etc. I don't like admitting that openly. But the reasons lie in a decision made 1000 years ago to actively forbid further evolution of social practice. The religion started out, like most religions that actually take root, with a vision of social justice. And it worked towards creating that social justice. It set things up so that slavery gradually eliminated itself in the Muslim world much before the Western world. It guaranteed women's property rights, etc. And then it was taken over by the power-hungry, as so many movements are, and, indeed, as virtually all faiths have been. So the dominant dogma has fossilized. There are still scholars doing a great deal of work on the logical evolution of Islamic law to match current social realities, but they are not part of the mainstream. Besides which, what fun would it be for the Islamophobic media to admit to the existence of educated, enlightened, believing Muslims, when it's so much more colourful to imagine us all wrapped in turbans or veils of backwardness and bigotry?

Ok, this is simply brilliant. While reading up on the upcoming election in the US, I chanced across meetup.com. The urge to browse by location is always irresistible to me. What people use the Web for, and how that varies geographically, is fantastic. Case in point, the Pakistani use of Meetup. Well over half the members of several of the Meetup groups in Pakistan are looking for dates. Of course you have to be of two cultures to understand the humour in desperate, single Pakistani men signing up as members of an Indigo Girls Fan Club, clearly having NO idea whatsoever that Indigo Girls is a band and honing in on the Girls part of the name. This explains why, in both Karachi and Islamabad, the Gilmore Girls Meetup and the Indigo Girls Meetup have well over 100 members. ROFL! I didn't even bother to go to the Sex and the City Meetup. Who knows what horrors await in the member profiles.

I am tired of seeing negative press on Islam. Tired because so much of it is so ill-informed, and tired because the Muslim response to it tends to be equally ill-informed.

This latest surge of irritation comes from reading Premack and Premack's Original Intelligence. They state that a Muslim woman must fear disfigurement or death if she goes against her father's will in her choice of husband, and that this practice stems from the Muslim belief system.

Now the thing is, their description fits many Muslim women, but not Muslim women in general, and more importantly, the belief systems of many Muslims, but not the Muslim belief system in general. Of course what really gets me is the particular choice of words the Premack's make. Women, they say, have a "lowly status" in "the Muslim belief system" (they take great care not to say 'Islam'). Respectfully, I must disagree with them. Traditional Islamic law does give women a subordinate status in many respects, but subordinate is not the same thing as lowly. The vice-president is subordinate to the president, but this does not make his status lowly, and if one is talking about the incumbents in the US government, then the distinction may be merely legal, rather than descriptive of the actual power balance.

Outsider perceptions of Muslim families seem to me to ignore the nuance of give and take that exists in every family. Some families are dysfunctional everywhere, but we don't seem to think that being dysfunctional is the product of a larger belief system as a whole. Why don't we attribute the ignorance of some Muslims (or even many, or most Muslims) to their lack of education, to the appalling repression that they have lived under for centuries, in most cases, or any of another dozen reasons more plausible than this vague "Muslim belief system"?

Given that diary writing always turns on the "reader's ear" in my brain, a public diary seems appropriate. So, here goes.