LIKE IT OR NOT,
LABELS STILL STICK

Dec. 2, 2007

By Mary Koch

            Sometimes I think life is just a progression of labels. You emerge from the womb and it’s like walking into a workshop or meeting: Someone prints your identity with a felt-tip pen on an adhesive-backed name tag and slaps it onto your chest.

            The labels lose their stickiness and fall off as you age, but they’re replaced. You go from infant to terrible two, pre-schooler, student, teen. Labels take on more significance and variation as we begin to shape our adult lives. There are relationship labels: wife, husband, father, mother, single parent. There are the seemingly important titles that come with jobs, especially in a world where what we do is often misperceived as who we are.

            I learned a lesson about how labels really matter when my husband and I traveled to South Korea in the early ‘80s. We both did pretty much the same kind of work as husband-wife owners of a weekly newspaper, but his passport identified him as a “publisher,” while I was a “journalist.”

            He sailed right through the entry process at Seoul. I was stopped by an angry, uniformed official who pointed to the offending line on my passport and shouted at me: “Journalist! What’s this, ‘Journalist’?” His intent was not to keep me out but to let me know that I was more disgusting than slug slime and I’d better not be bringing any of my freedom-of-the-press viral infections into that nation, where news at that time was carefully sanitized.

            Another problem with labels is that they so often describe who we are not or what we don’t have: Unemployed, working poor, high-school drop-out, illegal immigrant, widow.

            No one wants the title widow (or widower) and you don’t earn it until you are without, until you have experienced a wrenching, soul-searing, grievous loss. Considering the courage widowhood requires, it should be like wearing a purple heart if not a congressional medal. Yet when I tried to attach the widow label to myself, it seemed alien, incongruous, definitely NOT me.

            My image of widows, I’m sure, stems from childhood reading. Often they were depicted in books as stark, lonely characters, aged, grim, dressed in perpetual black. A very narrow view when you consider there are all kinds of widows: merry widows, black widows, golf widows, grass widows. And there are widow makers, widow’s peaks, widow’s walks, widow’s weeds (mine tend to be turtle necks and jeans), and of course, the biblical widow’s mite.

            The mite was an inferior coin of poor quality and still has relatively little value among collectors, according to an Internet site I found. Supposedly, you can pick up one of these pieces of antiquity for as little as $5.

Jesus commended the poor widow (in his day, “poor widow” was a redundancy) for putting all she had into the offering box. I’m inclined to think, he may have been referring to an offering much larger than mere coins.

© Mary Koch, Omak, Washington 2007