By Cristy Trandahl
A smile is an inexpensive way to change your looks.
~Charles Gordy
"What a crabby-looking lady," the cashier at my local convenience store whispered to her co-worker. I was tromping through the toilet paper aisle grabbing products off the shelf like it was Y2K all over again. I had a half dozen kids waiting for me in the van, and here's the thing: they were all my own children. No time for polite. No casual conversation with the checkout lady, no nod of approval toward the stock boy, no breathing. Just get the toilet paper, two gallons of milk and some Frosted Flakes and get back out in the trenches!
But I was intrigued by the crabby-looking lady. Which one was she? Hoisting a family pack of toilet paper under my arm, I scanned the tiny store for the crabby lady. Let's see, there's a middle-aged guy in aisle three stocking up on pork rinds, an older gentleman at the checkout purchasing an egg salad sandwich and a coffee, and... just then I saw her, the crabby-looking lady.
Her eyes were small slits; her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail so tight it looked like her forehead would snap off. Her mouth was a severe gash between pinched cheeks. A deep furrow cut the lady's brows. Crabby wasn't the word. This lady looked like she had either smelled something really bad or was about to single-handedly euthanize her own cat. Couldn't tell which. Then, I turned away from my own reflection in the convex security mirror at the back of the store. The crabby looking lady... was me!
That night, after I ran the troops through bath, brush and bed routine, I plopped on my bed and sobbed. I was the crabby-looking lady! Me! The girl voted nicest smile by her high school class. I had become a cross between Morticia from The Addams Family and a lemon! Right then and there I resolved to do one thing over the next year. One simple resolution: to smile. I didn't need to wait for January 1st — I would start right now. Simple, right? Sure, if you're a televangelist. Or naturally nice. Or just had a lobotomy. But I'm a mom. And moms have stuff to accomplish. People depend on us to be crabby! How else do bedrooms get picked up?
I mean, a smile is perfectly appropriate for those "Oh, sweetie, thanks for picking a handful of dandelions for mommy and saying you wuv wuv wuv me" days. But what about the days when the teenagers broke curfew and the dog puked Oreos on the bathroom floor and Dad is late from work again and the baby is doing that colicky thing? On days like that I'm just supposed to (twitch, twitch) smile?
Well, unless I wanted to end up looking like a shrunken head, all I could do was try. Of course I didn't tell anyone about my smile resolution. I mean, it was going to be hard enough to smile without my kids making comments like, "Mom, is there something wrong with your face?" I would just go smiley on my own terms. At least ten times a day, I would make a conscious effort to smile. And it wouldn't count if I did it ten times in a row. It had to be... incremental.
The first day of "Mission Smile" I smiled at (and this is in order): a strange dog who peed on my daughter's new school shoes (while she was in them), the mailman, three of my six children (I couldn't muster more than a smirk for the teenagers just yet), a librarian who asked me if I was aware of the global overpopulation problem, and my bathtub. I smiled at my husband over the phone when he called to say he'd be late from work (it wasn't really much of a smile, more like a facial spasm). And I smiled at myself in the mirror twice, just to remind myself what a smile looked like. (Mouth curved upwards, twinkle in eyes, good... now think happy thoughts.)
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After the first week of smiling practice, I discovered that if I forgot to smile all morning, I could make up for it by watching I Love Lucy reruns after the kids went to bed. I thought of it as extra credit smiling homework.
After a month, though, a weird thing happened. I didn't even try to find things to smile at and I'd still notice this funny sensation take over my face. It was like Pavlov's dogs to a bell: I'd see my kids run in from playing "throw mud at the sibling with the lowest IQ" and Ding! Smile. When my teenage daughter loaded the dishwasher with her soccer shin pads and cleats... Ding! Smile. Even when we were really late for church and fangs began to protrude from my upper jaw and venom dripped from my incisors and I hissed, "Hurry little children, it's time to partake in the precious body and blood of Christ!" Ding! Smile. It was actually kind of unsettling, this smile thing. Like I could actually be happy in the midst of chaos!
The final blow came, though, after nine months or so of my resolution. I was meeting a couple of friends for our regular date at a local coffee shop. Bursting though the coffee shop door in my usual haphazard manner, I overheard the cashier behind the coffee counter remark to a co-worker, "There's that happy looking lady again."
And I didn't even have to look around the coffee shop to know who she was talking about. I could see my own reflection in the cash register on the counter. The forty-year-old voted best smile... by me.
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