Today I passed ultrasound photos around at our monthly staff meeting. Most of the staff work at different sites so we only see each other at these monthly meetings...
Anyway, I passed them to one of the other nurse practitioners... who, let me just say, is from another country. I won't say which as I don't want to make stereotypes... though of course stereotypes come from someplace! And it might've helped others to be more sympathetic to her if they knew this was normative for her culture. I have worked with many nurses from her country and I have found them to be, umm, very free to ask questions. In a word, nosy. If you were being culturally insensitive. So it's not that she's just completely out of bounds. It's that she defines bounds differently than some of us born in this country. So I was a little nervous about what she would say or ask when she saw my pictures.
True to form, she asked a million questions. But the first thing she shared, before any of the questions, was,
"I envy you."
And that about broke my heart. Apparently she has told other coworkers that because she had to raise her many sisters, she never got a chance to have her own children.
How lucky am I, are we all, that we live in a time and place where we have this incredible freedom?
And speaking of feeling grateful, last night, for the first time, I thanked this little fetus, not of mine, but of my body for the time being, for choosing me.
Thank you.
What a wonderful first comment to get - sad for her, but wonderful for you (and the rest of us) to hear.
ReplyDeleteI get nosy questions all the time - more so than my pregnant friends who are married. I can't tell you the number of times someone has asked if my pregnancy was planned. Really.