I was talking with various people last night, and one of them told me about his sister’s alcoholic ex-husband, let’s call him Nick. Nick apparently wanted to introduce his kids to his new girlfriend. Everyone in the room proceeded to roll their eyes and make negative comments, because Nick has used up his right to the benefit of the doubt. Everyone put up with him for years, but he has destroyed all the good will they could muster up. I have followed the Nick saga from afar over the years, so I knew why they felt that way.

Later, I was telling a story about something that happened in my family, where a family member repeatedly didn’t believe me. “I never understood why they acted like that,” said one of the people in the room, who has known me a very long time.

I paused. “I was my family’s Nick,” I finally said, and I could feel the atmosphere shift, so I left it at that.

I remember my childhood and young adulthood vividly. My father and mother fought a lot, but my sister informs me they fought about me most of the time until I went off to college and they realized they couldn’t stand each other and got divorced.

When I was playing with my cousins, whenever anything went wrong, the cry went up, “DT did it!” and yes, I usually had done “it,” whatever it was.

I began drinking very young, and angered a lot of family members for various reasons; my great-uncle went so far as to explicitly disinherit me, and though his brother got his estate after he died, the brother was instructed to maintain the disinheritance. I was a bad influence. Although it was my sister who put on the drunken brawl on family property in honor of my 21st birthday, and I left early, throwing up out a car window as I departed, I am sure I got the blame for it.

And then I stopped drinking at 22, and became remarkably staid.

I stayed sober, and have been pretty darn boring for the last 52 years. I got married, had a kid, taught elementary and middle school, and was the local daughter for ten years when my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I nursed my husband through the end of his life. I pay taxes. I own my house free and clear. I have a 401(k) (I met with my financial advisor yesterday and we talked about his Great Dane).

Yet through all those years, from time to time, something would happen to remind me that in my family of origin, I would never outlive my well-earned reputation for wildness, untrustworthiness, and general dissolution.

It’s not a big deal. Most of the people who felt that way are dead now. But family is funny like that. You get assigned a role, and you don’t get to change the role, even when everything else in the world has changed, and you with it.