Earlier this week, driving back from one Carolina to the other, I stopped for lunch at a Bob Evans. In the car, I had been enjoying one kind of cultural immersion: Nonstop 80’s music on XM Radio. (Bananarama, anyone?) Inside the restaurant, an entirely different cultural experience awaited.
“Have a seat, Baby Girl,” the waitress was saying – I eventually understood – to me. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
I’m not a “Baby Girl.” Even when I was a baby girl, I wasn’t a “Baby Girl” – sports-loving, Daddy-shadowing, car-noticing tomboy that I was. Having no one to share a chuckle with there in the restaurant, I did what we’re meant to do in such moments: I posted it on Facebook – and many of you “LOL”ed with me throughout the afternoon.
But I didn’t correct the server – didn’t ask her what she meant by the salutation; didn’t take issue with her characterization and list off in bullet points all the reasons it didn’t apply to me. Because it wasn’t about me. I was in rural South Carolina, about to be served a biscuit and grits, and “Baby Girl” was as much a part of the tapestry of the setting as the sweet tea and pecan pie. It would stay to greet the next customer, while I would eventually get up and leave.
Maybe the next time a situation catches me off-guard and I begin to overanalyze how it is that someone’s assessment is so far afield from who I know myself to be, I’ll whisper to myself, “Baby Girl,” and consider that maybe, just maybe, it’s not about me.
Storied Life, Illustrated. 
And how do we know when it is and when it is not about “me”? What is the line between trying to be who we think we are in the world and trying to get along in he world, recognizing the many times when it is not about me? I think is is a hard one in parenting, how to teach your child when (and how) to say something when it is “about me” and when something is part of the tapestry.
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