Why Pakistan's society keeps mothers stuck at home

The first year: “It’s nothing like it ever was”

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming back Humna Raza, who had appeared on the show in its first season. A year had passed since the birth of their son, and Muzamil asks her simply: what was that experience like?

Humna does not reach for a single word. “There’s not just one,” she says. “It’s such a big deal. It’s a wonderful change in your life.” She describes enjoying motherhood deeply, but is equally clear that the challenges were real. What struck her most was not the difficulty of caring for a newborn — that came naturally — but the difficulty of fitting motherhood into the rest of her life. “Motherhood ko apni regular life mein fit karna nahin aaya,” she explains. Everything outside the baby suddenly felt unnatural.

For the first six months, she had no help. She began working again by the third month, coming downstairs with the baby or calling on her mother when she could, but without any consistent support. It was only at the six-month mark, when Muzamil’s family returned and a nanny was hired, that a real routine became possible. Even then, she notes, leaving a baby alone with a nanny without another adult in the house is not something most parents can do comfortably. The trust has to be built first.

The “Doctor Bahu” problem and what that ad actually said

From the personal, the conversation moves to the structural. Muzamil raises a television commercial by the brand Shaan that had recently circulated — one centred on the figure of the “Doctor Bahu,” a daughter-in-law who has completed a medical degree but is expected, after marriage, to set it aside entirely.

Humna calls it a genuinely interesting piece of work. “I don’t think this has ever been picked up before,” she says. What she found most powerful was not the broad argument but a specific image: the doctor leaving for the hospital, handing her child to her mother-in-law, and the expression on her face as she walks out the door. “Woh jo ek emotion, woh emotional load ka, woh mental load ka expression hai — it’s very true.”

The ad, she argues, captured something precise: that families want the label of a doctor daughter-in-law but have no interest in what that label actually requires. “Trophy rakh diya ghar mein — Doctor Bahu toh hai hamari — but then expectation jo hoti hai wahi hoti hai.” Muzamil adds a further dimension: for a country already facing a shortage of doctors and significant brain drain to the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, the cultural pressure on female doctors to stop practising is not just a personal injustice — it is a structural problem for the healthcare system.

Humna sharpens the hypocrisy: “Hum log doctor bahu chahte hain, theek hai? Hum doctor bahu aur doctor beewiyon ko kaam karne dena nahin chahte. Lekin hum chahte hain ke hamari jo doctor ho woh bhi female ho.” The demand for female doctors in clinical settings — particularly for female patients — coexists with the expectation that those same women will not actually practise.

The mental load that never clocks out

Muzamil frames the next section deliberately. He notes that a significant portion of his audience is unmarried men, and that Pakistan’s economy is making single-income households increasingly difficult to sustain. He asks Humna: for men who want to understand what it actually means to support a working woman, what are the real challenges?

Her answer is precise. The problem is not usually that families refuse to allow women to work. In many modern households, that permission is given. The problem is that the permission is not accompanied by any redistribution of domestic responsibility. “Working woman ka challenge yeh hota hai ke she is still expected to have it together at home.”

The result is a constant background noise that men in the same workplace simply do not carry. “Jab woh workplace par bhi challenge aata hai ke yaar mere paas itna time nahin hai jitna mardon ke paas hota hai — is just like jaldi jaldi saare apni cheezein task nikalo, ghar jaana hai, ghar mein all of this is waiting for me at home.” She is not describing occasional stress. She is describing a structural condition in which a woman’s productive capacity at work is permanently taxed by the knowledge of what is waiting for her at home.

The solution, Humna argues, is not simply telling men to “do more” — a phrase that lands badly because many men already feel they are overachieving against the expectations set for them. The conversation has to be more specific. “Ladkon ko yeh samajh nahin aayi ke agar freedom di gayi hai kaam karne ki, that means ke ghar par haath batana hoga.” And she adds something harder: women themselves have internalised the same conditioning. “Hum bhi jab ghar hume hota hai ke bas hum ghar gaye hain toh humein hi sab kuch karna hai — and in fact guilty feeling hoti hai agar koi aapki help kar raha hai, because you are like, oh, this was supposed to be my real job.”

Postpartum depression and the isolation no one talks about

Later in the discussion, Humna raises postpartum depression — not as a passing reference but as a clinical and social reality that most men in Pakistan have no framework for understanding.

She explains the mechanism: after childbirth, a woman’s happy hormones drop sharply and rapidly. Combined with physical recovery — whether from a C-section or natural delivery, stitches, hair loss, and general weakness — the result can be a depression severe enough that “it can make you feel like your life is over.” She is direct about the conditions that make it worse: lack of support, lack of freedom, and isolation.

That isolation, she argues, is not incidental. It is built into the way Pakistani society is structured. A breastfeeding mother has to feed her child every hour and a half to two hours. If there are no breastfeeding rooms in malls or workplaces, she cannot leave the house. If there are no trusted daycares, she cannot leave the baby. If footpaths have no stroller ramps and public spaces are not baby-friendly, every errand becomes a logistical ordeal. “Aap auraton ko stuck se stuck karte ja rahe ho ghar ke andar kyunke aapne apni society ko banaya hua hi nahin hai aisa.”

Muzamil draws on a trip the two of them took to Turkey when Humna was five months pregnant. There, pregnancy clothing was available in mainstream stores, strollers were everywhere, and ramps were standard. Returning to Pakistan, the contrast was stark. “Pakistan mein aayi toh aisa lagta ke society mein koi bachcha hota hi nahin hai.” He had never thought about pregnancy clothing until his own wife needed it and could not find it. The infrastructure simply did not exist.

What being in the labour room actually does to a father

One of the most direct exchanges in the conversation comes when Humna raises the question of fathers in the labour room. Many hospitals in Pakistan, she notes, do not allow husbands to be present during childbirth — the space is reserved for the mother or mother-in-law.

Muzamil describes what being present meant for him. “Jo bhi mujhe tha, usse thousands of magnitudes woh zyada thi cheez what I experienced there.” He had wondered beforehand whether he would feel anything. What he experienced was the opposite of numbness: time slowed, everything else faded, and a relationship was formed in that room that would not have formed any other way. “From that moment — then and there.”

He connects this directly to a broader pattern. “Pakistan mein the reason why men or fathers are so disconnected from their children is because in the early years — pehla unko labour room mein nahin rakha, doosra raat mein kabhi nahin uthe, aapne woh cheezein dekhi nahin, experience nahin ki.” The exclusion of fathers from the birth is not a neutral administrative policy. It is the first in a series of separations that make genuine co-parenting structurally harder to achieve.

Humna agrees and extends the point: “Aapke husband, jo fathers ki relationship hai na apne bacchon ke saath — aap labour room mein daale aur aap log dekhen — das hazar guna differently.” A friend of Muzamil’s had recently had a son and messaged him afterwards saying he finally understood what Muzamil had meant. The experience of witnessing birth changes something that cannot be changed any other way.

The shrinking world of women who are never included

By the end of the conversation, Humna makes an observation that extends well beyond parenting. She describes what happens at social gatherings — even ones where both men and women are present. The men sit together and talk. The women with children spend the entire time managing those children. “So they are not growing. Unko duniya ke baare mein nahin — woh kyun politics se bahar hain? News se, current affairs se bahar hain? Kyun hain? Women don’t get that sort of a space.”

The consequence is cumulative. Women who are never given the space to participate in substantive conversations become less equipped to participate in them. They are then not taken seriously in serious spaces — not because they are less intelligent, but because they are not up to date. And then the cycle reinforces itself. “Bhai dekho tum apna kaam karo, maa wala kaam karo.” Nobody says it out loud. But the structure says it constantly.

Muzamil asks Humna where she is now, a year in. Her answer is measured. The biggest struggle, she says, was with identity. She had been, before the baby, “aggressively, very overly ambitious” — someone who worked constantly. Motherhood came naturally, but it consumed her entirely, to the point where she could not form normal sentences. “Mujhse normal sentences form nahin hote the.” She has recovered from that, she says, and now feels like more than just a mother — “a person with an identity of her own.” The balance is not perfect. But it is, finally, beginning to make sense.