Playing the Part- rambling on roles

We have all witnessed introductions. Strangers meeting, shaking hands, indulging the throwaway weather chatter after which inevitably is asked the rather profound, “Who are you?” or the more delicate “What do you do?”

As proper social custom dictates, we are to reinterpret the questions as entirely mundane; “Lawyer, Pharmacist, Sales Associate are more appropriate answers than “I am a fragile, jealous, and cold-heartedly ambitious individual; I cry at Bach, love to eat fish with peanut butter, and once betrayed the only person I have ever loved.”

Even despite themselves, the proper answers are strangely revealing in that they symbolize the shared class-based understanding that we actually are our chosen professions. In the modern age, when the discovery of communal-living has allegedly freed us from the constrains of mere survival, established specialization as a means to obtain leisure time, and given individuals the chance to be…themselves…in that earned time-off, it is here that we find ourselves still caught up in less-than modern classifications.

Perhaps I have missed the point and it is only now that the enlightened view that "you are your job" can truly be accurate. With men (and women) given the flexibility to reach beyond their stars and actually decide their own vocation, why not then make judgements of the characters types and personalities who would make those specific choices? A capitalist craves order, a police officer creates it, and a painter may spend his life defying both; the things we do for money become the face we show the world, and that, in turn, is the only identity the world reflects back upon us.

Among all of these are a handful of professions which we place above the common milieu of jobs…they are seen as callings: doctor, pastor (reverend), judge, professor, mother (mom) and father (dad). For these roles (and there must be more I am leaving out), the individuals lose themselves completely, names become titles (in a way Mr. and Ms. never could) and they are expected to act like and in fact, BE doctors, pastors, mothers, in every aspect of their lives---even outside of the formal engagements of the 9-5. Imagine a doctor on vacation who declines to treat a woman passed out on the beach chair next to his...it is more than just immoral or the omission of a not-so-good Samaritan, it is an immediate nullification of their status as a doctor.

I was shocked to learn that my parents were not always called “mom” and “dad.” We were in a department store when I got swept away momentarily by the crowd and shrilled out “Mooooooooooom” to supposedly locate that one person to whom the term referred, only to be greeted by a whole crowd of women who turned around to call back (before recognizing that my face was not their own). There was a feeling of sustained possession that arose from my newfound grasp of the name that was actually a role. She was MY mother, and he was MY father, and the doctor belonged to all of us, as did the pastor and the professor, and the judge. It is our collective sense of entitlement to the services provided by these characters that creates the overwhelming force of the role.

My parents never called me “daughter,” (though I suppose that in some cultures they could have), I was always afforded the privilege of a name of my own. I thinkit may be because I never chose to be a daughter; one’s identity, after all, is still an act of self-formation. I find it interesting that my mom and dad still prefer these titles to their given names. They feel that it binds us together as a family unit, and I am the lynchpin on which their names, their very beings exist. Modern families are centered around the children to whom much is given, little expected, and for whom more is suppressed. Though they do not say it, being a mother and father gives my parents proscribed purpose---a job that still needs to be done, though I am long out of the house and swaddling clothes.

A man, in his time, plays many parts, but there are some that define our careers, our lives, and through which we are forever typecast.

Sometimes I think about what it means to be a writer, an actor, a critic…and what it would take to change the preceding article to “the.”