When People Aren't Who You Expect Them To Be

Scripts and Social Roles and Optimism

Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash

My mom went to a casino in Atlantic City with my aunt once when I was in college and called me immediately afterward, gasping into the phone like someone had died.  

I stood at the dorm phone at Bates College, leaning in, trying to wait patiently for my little hobbit of a mom to get out what she was trying to say. The carpets were beer-soaked from the party the night before. The red Solo cups scattered around the lounge, some stacked into each other in a half-hearted attempt to clean up. I counted to thirty.

Finally, she gasped out, “Your aunt…She was… She wouldn’t leave. She wanted to just keep playing and playing.”

“And?”

“And it was three in the morning!”

To give this story some context, my mom was always in bed by eleven. To give this story some more context, my mom was not someone who gambled, who said the f-word, who when she needed to swear, she yelled, “Sugar diabetes.”

“So, how did you get her to leave?” I asked as the guy in charge of our dorm, stepped into the hall in just his boxers, hustled a junior out of his room, turned and gave me a giant wink before stepping back into his room again.

“We had to drag her off.” She lists all of her friends. “I didn’t know her, Carrie. We’ve been friends all our lives and I didn’t know her.”

PEOPLE HAVE LAYERS

My mom’s shock and disbelief at my aunt’s gambling personality rocked her perceptions to the core, obviously. She was stunned and shaken for quite a while. She asked me how I felt when my high school boyfriend came out. How did I deal with him not being who I thought he was? And I told her that he was who he thought I was. It was just his sexuality that wasn’t. And that was how it was with my aunt.

“So what do you do?” she asked.

“You just keep loving them. One part of them doesn’t make up the entire whole. One part of them doesn’t forever define all of them. It’s not a betrayal of you for you to not be aware of all of them all the time. People have layers.”

People have layers.