It Is All About Me

Whether someone frames things as all about them or all about you, both can come from a distorted angle on the world. On one end sits the person who agonizes over every opinion others might hold. On the other sits the person who pays attention to people only when there's something to be extracted: a reaction, an audience, maybe a share of the estate someday.

Hospital visitors have stuck with me for years. A guest sits down beside someone who is seriously unwell and somehow the talk drifts to the guest's own surgeries, the guest's current aches, the time the guest went through something similar. The sick person in the bed fades into the background of a conversation that was supposed to be about them. And it keeps going even when the patient is exhausted, even when a nurse is waiting to do something that needs doing, because the patient doesn't want to be rude and send the company away.

There's a version of this that turns stranger when it plays out between a parent and a grown child, and the usual roles flip. Picture a parent who is reasonably healthy at the moment. You'd assume the parent's attention would rest on the child's wellbeing. Now the daughter is about to give birth, and she has decided she wants her husband, a friend who has been through labor herself, and the medical team in the room. Nobody else. If you were her mother, would it sting? Would you lean on her to let you in anyway, insisting that being the grandmother earns you a place at the front of the line?

Sometimes you have to look after yourself regardless of how anyone else reads it. During the final stretch of delivery, when a woman is consumed by her own pain and focused on her body and her baby, she isn't thinking about who came to watch, whether her words are polite, or who can see parts of her she'd normally keep private. That was certainly true for me. In that moment the usual rules stopped applying, and whatever I said and did was simply what the moment called for. It helps to have someone there who can advocate for the mother, her wishes and her needs, especially during the stretches when she can barely stay conscious.

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