So what do you do?

When Sam and I first got married, he couldn't understand why I was very reserved when we first met people. He is out there, heart first, slapping people's shoulders and smiling broadly. I like to be friendly and outgoing, but in certain situations it is best not to get too friendly very fast because the dreaded question will come up: What do you do for a living? It also may not be good for certain people to know that I'm a doctorally prepared professor. Because all too often I get strange responses when I tell people the kind of work I do, or identify my profession.

Sam didn't understand this in the early days.
"You should be proud, honey!" He grins widely. "I am!"
"I'd prefer to just say that I'm a teacher and be done with it."
"That's minimizing who you are," he said.
There are times when that is smart.
Sam just didn't get it.

Then we met the new pastor.
It was over the church potluck that I became more acquainted with him. He had just come to our district and I wanted to be welcoming toward him. He had been a student of my father's many years ago and I wanted to make a personal connection so he would feel more comfortable in a new church with people who could be a bit standoffish. My father had always spoken highly of this man when he was his student. Pastor responded very warmly when I told him who my father was. He had very good memories of living in New York when he was a kid.

"So what do you do for a living?" he asked Sam. Sam was delighted to share that at the time he was in sales. They chatted several minutes about the product that Sam dealt in while I braced myself for him to turn to me. I tried to keep the conversation going about Sam, but Pastor suddenly turned to me.
"And do you work outside the home, Barbara?"
I smiled and tried to look enthusiastic. "Oh yes. I manage to stay busy these days."
"And what do you do for work?"
I gave my standard answer: "I'm a teacher."
"Oh!" he exclaimed, "How nice...what grade do you teach?"
It always irks me when it's assumed that I teach grade school just because I'm a woman.
"Older kids," I said, truthfully.
He smiled, condescendingly. "Do you teach in middle school?"
I might as well get it over with. "No. Actually, I teach college students."
His smile faded and he looked surprised. "Oh. What subject do you teach?"
"Well, I teach counseling."
"Ah!" He laced his fingers together on the table in front of him and looked down at his hands.
I tried to move the conversation on to other things. "Didn't you just move from Cinncinati?"
"Well, yes....Are you a counselor, then?" There was hardly a pause between the two sentence clauses.
"Yes." There was nothing more to say about that.
"Do you practice therapy?" He looked sick.
"I have a small practice." Pastor looked down at his hands again. Perspiration stood out on his forehead as he turned in his chair away from me to face the people in the room (none of whom were directing their comments toward him at that moment).
The excited chatter from the potluck was ringing in my ears. I turned to look at Sam. He was looking at me with a questioning expression.
Wheeling around in his chair, Pastor asked tentatively, "So you have a master's degree then?"
"Yes, I do." I nodded, glad he hadn't asked anything else.
Pastor turned back to the crowd. I looked at Sam, who raised one eyebrow at me in a kind of unspoken comment: How strange!
Pastor seemed deep in thought. He was smiling as if in a conversation with someone else, turned 180 degrees away from where I was sitting.
Again, he lurched around in his seat to face me. "Do you have a PhD?" There was a sound of hushed horror in his voice.
"Uh...yes."
"You are a professor then?"
"Yes."
Pastor turned back toward the others in the room, with his back directly to me for the rest of the meal. Sam and I carried on an almost voiceless conversation, with lots of nonverbal commentary about what had just happened.
Pastor gave me the cold shoulder and behaved very strangely around me for the next year while we lived there. Very odd. Either he had issues that he believed I could somehow divine, or he'd had a bad experience with a therapist and didn't want to deal with me, assuming that I would respond to him in exactly the same manner as his nemesis. Or, he could have been insecure, since he didn't attend seminary and held an associate degree in computer science. Not that this would matter to me if he did a good job with the congregation. But it didn't feel good to be on the receiving end of whatever issue he was projecting onto me.

These kinds of odd responses are frequent. I'm sitting on an airplane and a nervous young woman is trying to make conversation with me while we lift off.
"So what do you do?" she asks, her hands clutching the sides of her seat.
"I'm a marriage and family therapist." There. Let's see what happens when I just say it straight out.
Her eyes widen and she turns toward me. "Oh! I can ask you this question then." She then leans into me and in a rapid whisper says, "I just found out yesterday that my sister is having an affair. I am so shocked. And I want to do something to help her but I'm so mad at her for being so dumb. She has three small children and while she's getting ready to leave her husband and children they're asking, "Where are you going, Mommy?" And it just breaks my heart. Why is she doing this and what should I do?"
I open my mouth to empathize, purposely avoiding engaging her about her sister, and she leans closer to interrupt me: "You are the perfect seatmate for a direct flight! Talk to me!"
I wish I'd told her I was a ditch digger from Omaha. Why would anyone think that I want to do my job during vacation--and for free? To most people, doing what I do seems like a non-job (I'm just a kind person who likes to listen), or else so exotic that they think I'm always "on," eager and ready for what they feel is a good story. Not so.

So after all of these flights and awkward introductions, I've come up with the perfect response when I'm asked what I do: "I'm a social scientist researcher." No one knows what that is, and when I say the word research, they turn off. If they press me, I can launch into a boring discussion about postmodern influences on family structure. Research is actually, one of the things that I do, and being able to say this suits me well. Then the conversation can be about incidental, human interest things in my life or what is going on with their lives without concern that I'm having to be perfect, looking through them, reading their minds, or that I'm interested in solving their family issues.
I am decidedly not the only person who has this happen. But it drives me nuts. And a therapist who feels like she's going nuts isn't really good, is it?