Labels

"If you mean libels, I'd say ao, and not talk about labels, as if Papa were a pickle bottle," one of the older March girls said to baby sister Amy in Little Women. 

A libel is something written, printed, published, about a person or company, that is harmful and also untrue. 

A label is, properly, a piece of paper stuck on a bottle, box, or bag to identify its contents. "Label" is also sometimes used to mean things people say about other people that may or may not be either harmful or untrue. 

In Little Women Papa was a minister who served as a chaplain in the army, but his neighbors thought his ideas were irregular, possibly heretical. He didn't preach regularly in a big, rich church. He let Meg marry a poor man and Jo marry a man who was non-wealthy, older, and foreign, without a single word to the effect of "Why can't you fall in love with that rich, good-looking boy next door?" He earned enough money to feed and clothe his children, but in a frugal style, not a show-offy one. Instead of fancy clothes, jewelry, yachts, or horses the March girls got to share their good plain meals and things with poor people. We don't hear what Amy's little school friends are saying about her Papa, but we can guess. "What a pity your Papa's not intelligent enough to earn enough money to buy you a ring like mine..."  

Looking back, I think I was "labelled" because, for one thing, not only I but even my brother could relate to Little Women. We had the same sort of father they had. We were poor relations ourselves; the nice things we had were handed down from relatives. Nevertheless I remember one day when Dad came in from his job--which was not preaching, but inspecting dumpsters--and said, "John Doe's house burned down over the weekend. His children are about your ages. Go and pick out the clothes and things you'd want somebody to send you if our house burned down." It was a "first." On other occasions our things had been picked through while we were at school, 

Dad was ordained by a church that had two requirements for ministers: that they had read the Bible, and that they send money to a mission in Mexico. But he didn't even do fundraising for that specific mission, because friends were always sending him appeals on behalf of other missions, and Dad believed all orphans were equally deserving. I heard nothing about "our mission." I heard about "this little girl just like you, only in India, Korea, Brazil, Mexico, New York City..." 

"Impractical idealist" is a label I might even endorse for ministers like Dad or like Amos Bronson Alcott. There are ruder ones.

For my whole extended family there was a collective label, in the mid-twentieth century. It would definitely violate this web site's contract to type that label. Using rude words was only beginning to be considered clever and trendy, but this one did seem sort of suitable. It managed to refer, all at one time, to the incidence of higher education in the family, the sense of a good healthy distance, and the one of our elders whose ministry during the tuberculosis era had involved waving tissues in people's faces and sternly saying "Don't sniff! Blow!" And then I was born an undiagnosed celiac, vulnerable to everything but especially to "colds" and allergies.

I don't remember really minding the rude nickname, but when The Sneetches came out I nicknamed myself "Weepy Weed." I didn't mind being called a Weepy Weed. I minded being one. To some extent I seemed to be "outgrowing that stage," at last, by the 1980s when chlordane was banned, but I thought of myself as a Weepy Weed until I went gluten-free. 

Some people might want to wax emotional about this memory and how "hurtful" it must have been. I don't remember being teased about a disease condition as one of the things I found terribly hurtful. Being uprooted and dragged to "a new home" at the other side of the continent was a source of pain, as I recall. Not being allowed to do things I wanted to do was. Things people called one another in the schoolyard were stupid jokes. The ones for teachers were generally worse than the ones for kids,

I was sheltered, in some ways. Not until I went to a church college, where seriously working with other people was required, did a sense of being labelled feel "hurtful" or harmful to me. Church schools tend to have their own tight little subcultures where being labelled an outsider, a misfit, can drive people to drink or suicide. I bonded with other outsiders and had a lot of fun for as long as I was singing at church events and earning Dean's List grades. Then I came down with mono, dropped out of school, and needed a job, and then that "outsider" label started to hurt. I was a vegan and a virgin and had never even wanted to "experiment" with drugs or alcohol. Mono affected my liver the same way LSD had affected some friends' livers. Everybody wanted to "help" me confess to a lot of things I'd never done, but actual help, as in employment so I could get out of student loan default and finish a degree, was out of the question. 

Being blessed with typing skills, I didn't sink into despair; I became an entrepreneur and was too busy having fun and earning money to stay depressed for very long. I merely grew up to be one of the many people who have a low opinion of Seventh-Day Adventists, even after being told that other church school communities can be just as bad.