31 year old Egyptian woman

My host XXX in Cairo gave me pause when her phone rang a baby's cry. I asked, "Is that yours?" No, she shook her head, half smiling, half crying. We were having lunch at a highly touristy- highly priced restaurant in the middle of XXXX market. It was a pleasure to dine in such a themed park diner meant to evoke the romance of Egypt, but you get the sense no one who lives here actually lives like this.

"I want to have babies," she told me without prompting. She says that's all she wanted now. With part regret she recalled being excited by going to school, and studying tourism and languages She makes more than her male family members giving tours of her city and its famous pymides. But she says, she is 31 years old, the same age as me. And in this society she is too old for marriage. Men will not ask for dates, they want younger she says. She says if you are not picked for marriage before 16-18 years, then chances are not likely she will get married. She started to tell me about a Turkish non-Muslim boy who had asked her for coffee years ago, but she could not be seen out with him in a cafe as it was against her religion to be seen with a man in public that is not her husband. She couldn't be seen with him, but thought about him for her husband. She said she wanted children with him or some one else.

I could read she was hopeful, but the hope started fading away long ago, and this was only a fraction of her. Her future dimmed every year a man would not take her. I was feeling the same pressure as I was months from turning 32. I had been dumped just months ago from a man who didn't see me in his future. Who after one and a half years of dating couldn't call me his girlfriend. Who just didn't love me and never said those words just so he could not be blamed later on, the looming break up he was always certain of and I feared since the beginning of our relationship.

I felt time, as she had. I felt time slipping. And I wanted everything now. As she had. The man, the baby, a future. The sound of babies crying, her own, my own baby crying.

But I felt young. Younger than she. I felt I have a few more years of hopefulness. She was dim and on the verge of cracking. I could wear shirts to show my shoulders, even that became an advantage I had and she didn't. Age, for the most part, was of the mind, her's a reality.

Money, the evidence of food, highly-priced food, laid on our table that we shared, was an issue that divide me and her. Our education, similar. But hers meant she could not meet suitors, mine meant I could.

How much longer does she have to be hopeful?

I paid for the meal and her as well. She gave me more than I thought I would see on a visit to Egypt.