‘Shh, it’s a secret: How being pregnant in the ’50s and ’60s compares to now’

Shh, it’s a secret! Once upon a lifetime, my mother was always proud that no one could tell she was expecting the next Baby Boomer, until she was seven months pregnant. By then her baby bump was swathed in loosely draped attire, dresses and tops, with large collars and bows. This was to draw people’s attention away from the expanding girth. Shh, it was all a secret!

When I was at that age, my friends were also pleased when someone said they weren’t showing. When they did, they were adorned with flowing loose maternity wear.

I was teaching at a local parochial primary school, so baby bumps were supposed to be concealed. God’s little sunbeams (the male pupils) were to be kept supposedly unaware that their female teachers and mothers had been doing ‘naughty’ things with their husbands, after holy nuptials in the Catholic church.

These days, we see young pregnant women clad in tight T-shirt tops, and close fitting skirts and dresses. The emphasis is now all on the growing bulge. Things are no longer a secret. No, the mothers of today did not have immaculate conception like our mothers, aka Attila the Hun! Everything changes with the times.

In modern times, very young children are educated quite early about where they came from, and where their siblings originated, and exactly how they were all conceived. No more secrets. Do they all know too much too young?

My mother seemed to disappear, then reappear with a baby. My parents told my older sister that they had found another baby in the cabbage patch. My sister promptly wondered why our mum and dad bothered to bring home more babies. Enter the sibling rivalry of our family life.

There were other theories to explain away the new arrival. Some children I knew firmly believed that they were brought to Australian society by fairies. Shh, it was all a secret!

Sex education was a secret too. Contraception was never mentioned. Maybe that was because my mother only had daughters. Talk about naïve.

Mothers-to-be wore only loose fitting maternity gear to hide the impending arrival. Polite society did not discuss such matters in the world of disinformation in which the Baby Boomers grew and bloomed.

Now you know where the Baby Boomers sprang. Shhh, it was all a secret!

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