Why Labeling People Doesn't Work

“Even the labels in the stores don’t tell you what you really want to know,” my friend said when I told him I was writing a piece about all the labels that are attached to people. I am a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a writer, a wanna-be singer, a friend. I am a baby boomer, a college graduate, a home owner, a recovering Catholic, a mother-in-law.

But who am I really? The sum of these things? Or the sum of a million other things? Halloween is my favorite holiday. I love milk chocolate Raisinets.  And Stephen King. And Brigham’s (a Boston favorite!) chocolate chip ice cream. But there are no labels for any of them.

When my granddaughter, Lucy, was born 11 years ago, she made me a grandmother. "Mimi," she calls me and it is my favorite name.

She also made me aware of all the labels we file people under, all the sets and subsets. Age. Gender. Nationality. Height. Weight. Black. White. Single. Married. Divorced.

This awareness began 12 hours after Lucy was born when a man in street clothes walked into my daughter’s hospital room where she was alone with her baby, and without introducing himself,  announced that “She [Lucy] seems to be evincing symptoms of Trisomy 21”—a chromosomal anomaly that causes Down syndrome. 

This man is a doctor, a label so prestigious and so important that it always precedes a person’s name. And yet, as my friend said, a label doesn’t tell you all you want to know.

I’ve learned and relearned this dozens of times since Lucy was born. I’ve learned that “doctor” doesn’t mean “without flaws,” that “old” doesn’t mean “infirm,”  that “infirm” doesn’t mean “useless,” that labels - high school graduate, cancer survivor, smoker, mother-in-law, are incomplete and very often harmful.

Down syndrome, for example. At first it devastated us. Of course it did. We are products of a culture that puts people in neat, little boxes. Down syndrome was a box filled with medical problems and intellectual deficits. Down syndrome meant a lifetime of sadness, of seeing, every day, all that Lucy could not do.

The label made us think that life was going to be diminished by Down syndrome. The truth is it has been enhanced. Because in the fine print there is Lucy, a good, happy child who has green eyes and light brown hair, who loves swings and chocolate ice cream and dining in fine restaurants with her mom and dad.  Who loves the movie Gone With the Wind and the musical Gypsy and live theater and dance, and long gloves and sparkly necklaces and life every single day. 

Sometimes, at the end of a day,  Lucy will run to her mother and father or me, whoever has been gone the longest, and with a smile as wide as her outstretched arms, race to us shouting  “Mom!” (Or “Dad” or “Mimi) You came back!”

She says, “Please” and “Thank you,” all the time. She never complains even on an eight- hour car drive. She’s always happy to see you. (Well, most of the time.) She tries and tries and tries. None of these parts of Lucy are labeled. 

Only the Down syndrome.

Mother-in-law is a misleading label, too, because it suffers the same limitations, it connotes everything bad and nothing good - interfering, unaccepting, cold, mean, calculating. Mother in law only, not in a person’s heart. 

The label “mother-in-law” makes a new daughter or son-in-law wary. And distant, sometimes. Stereotypes are that strong.

The truth is mothers-in-law run the gamut. Mine was wonderful. But I went into our relationship with the kickstand down and I kept it down for a long time, kept my distance emotionally, not because I didn’t like her. But because I thought that by liking her,  by actually loving her, I would be betraying my own mother. Ridiculous, right? But that’s how I felt.

I don’t know how you eliminate labels. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you have to have big signs that say "Smoker!" and "Non-smoker!" and "Male!" and "Female!" because you have to start somewhere.

But the problem is that a label is often an ending too. “Mother-in-law.” “Daughter-in-law.” “Grandparent.”  “Down syndrome.” “Autism.”  “Mental illness.”  You read these words and you think you know things. And you do, but they’re the wrong things.

Because a label is just a beginning, like an “exit” sign that leads nowhere if you just look at it. But follow it and it opens doors.