My smile at 48

What if in my late forties, I started smiling for me and me alone?

I have these lines on my face. Vertical slashes that start on either side of my mouth and stretch down to my chin. The first time I noticed them, I thought they were crease marks left from my pillow. Only temporary. I was wrong.

Ah, those would be wrinkles, I realized. Here for the duration.

I am not, in theory, averse to wrinkles. I read somewhere that we should all be so lucky to live long enough to have wrinkles and therefore greet them with gratitude and joy. And I am happy to have lasted this long.

I also read that wrinkles can tell you a lot about the kind of life you’ve lived. Laugh lines at the corner of your eyes mean you spent a lifetime smiling. Or squinting, I guess, but smiling sounds better.

So what facial expression etched those slashes onto my face? I’m afraid it was not smiling.

I have a complicated relationship with my smile, which is a fancy way of saying that I spent most of my life hating it. When I smile, my lip pulls up onto my gums. If I smile for too long, my gums dry out and my lip gets stuck there, like one of those old toothless dogs people are always posting pictures of, caught mid-snarl. My eyes, which I’m quite fond of as facial features go, disappear when I smile. My smile looks, to me, like a spasm, something totally beyond my ability to control, which it is.

Or is it?

I spent most of my life trying to control my smile, which is to say, suppress it. In all my school pictures from about the age of 12 on up, my smile is a tight-lipped affair. No teeth. No lips stuck on my gums. The smile you see in those photos is a controlled smile. Maybe not a real smile at all.

The 12-year-old version of me didn’t think she had a lot to smile about, anyway. Puberty sucks. If there’s a hell, it will be modeled after junior high (or Twitter, which is about the same thing). At 12, I had resting bitch face before resting bitch face was even a thing.

Kindergarten smile. Still adorable, though.

“Smile,” my mother said to me. “Smile,” my teachers instructed. “Smile,” my friends suggested. “Smile,” I guess boys would have said if my resting bitch face didn’t frighten them away.

“Fuck off,” I thought to myself. “Smiling is overrated.”

Serious people don’t smile all the time. That’s what I told myself. Smart people aren’t always grinning. They’re frowning with concentration as they think very deep thoughts. I quit cheerleading largely because smiling was a requirement.

Americans smile a lot, in a way that’s puzzling to people from other parts of the world. Are Americans that happy? Lol. Hardly. We come in about 16th in world rankings of happiness and even that I have to believe is mostly the delusion of happiness.

Americans smile a lot because we believe we’re supposed to be happy. We are, after all, the city on the hill. The ultimate immigrant destination.¹ The home of the American dream, even if it was never for everyone and is currently dying a slow and painful death.

Oh, enough with the gloom and doom! Smile! You’re in America! Right?

Women and femme-identifying people also experience more pressure to smile than other folx.² Even as a 12-year-old, I sensed people wanted me to smile so they could feel better about themselves. It had nothing to do with my actual feelings. Women’s smiles are shiny ornaments, designed to make the world prettier. As I felt about so many aspects of gender roles, I had no desire to play along.

Fast forward to my mid-forties and the wrinkles, the bodily legacy of my refusal to be a good girl or a good American. Fine. That’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Only, what if Americans are happy exactly because they’re smiling all the time? We like to think of our body as a puppet whose strings are being pulled by our mind or our soul or whatever you want to call the hand that’s running the show. But that’s not how it works. Studies show that consciously arranging your facial muscles into the semblance of a smile can boost your mood. Even a “fake” smile can trick your brain into being happy. The puppet, friends, has its own agenda…its own power.

At 48, I can see that not smiling as a woman because people want me to smile is its own kind of trap. I stepped outside one cage right into another. And of course you can be a serious person (whatever the hell that means) and smile. Of course smart people smile. Perhaps, in fact, the smartest people smile the most. Certainly, I’ve been struck over and over again by how the most enlightened people (which surely takes some intelligence) are also the most joyful. The Dalai Llama doesn’t just smile a lot. He laughs. He giggles. His laugh lines have laugh lines.

Why not smile, then? Even if it is fake? Why not embrace the weirdness that is my smile? Let it rip in all its squinty, lip-less glory.

At 48, it occurs to me that it might be time to reclaim my smile. Not as a forced expression of gender norms. Not as a badge of my American-ness. Not as another kind of makeup—window dressing for the pleasure of others and not myself.

What would happen, I find myself wondering, if I smiled purely for myself? If I cultivated smiling as a bodily practice to change how I felt inside, rather than to make myself prettier or more appealing to the outside world?

What if, as I’m walking along the river, watching the barges go by, I made the conscious effort to pull my lips up into the tiniest upward curve? Not for the creepy old guy who sits at the bench across from Bicentennial Park (we see you, dude), but for me. Not even to un-do those lines from my mouth to my chin. The not-smiling, after all, is still a part of who I am.

But what if, in my late forties, I started smiling for myself. For me and me alone. What if, at long last, I laid claim to my smile, in all its glory? It seems worth a try, at least.

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Other thoughts

This week I loved this post from Elizabeth Marro at

Spark

all about the weirdness of November, and with the added bonus of many murder-y Netflix recommendations.

And this from Anne Helen Peterson at

Culture Study

about how to make it easier to both care for and be cared for by the people we love.

Are you watching the new season of The Crown? I’m watching The Crown and thinking that Dominic West is way to pretty to play Charles. Are you with me?

I read the second novel in Olivia Atwater’s Regency Fairie Tales series—Ten Thousand Stitches—which I adore. Historical romance and fairies and always, a perfect dose of social commentary. Can’t wait for the next one.

But mostly, shout-out this week to the mid-November snow storm, which reminds me how much I love seasons and the lesson they bring us. Nothing stays the same and thank god for that! The heat of August won’t last forever. Right now, I’m ecstatic that it’s cold enough for me to wear my new winter coat (which is awesome). By February, I’ll be over it, but the cold will also end. What I’m saying is, as this calendar year draws to a close and it feels like we’re careening inevitably toward the END of something, I’m focusing on the spiralic nature of time (thank you, Lindsay Mack). The year isn’t a series of tear-off pages in a calendar. It’s a wheel and it’s turning now, not ending. Here’s to the turning of the wheel and the return of having the river all to myself in the cold!

Current smile, plus my awesome winter coat in the snow by the river on Saturday, when NO ONE ELSE was there

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1. You could argue that Canada is really the ultimate immigrant destination, with the highest percentage of immigrants in their population (23%) among G7 countries. In the U.S., we have more immigrants total (50 million), but only 15% of the population. And anyway, we hate our immigrants, right? After several months watching Republican campaign commercials in Ohio, it’s hard not to come to that conclusion.

2. In fact, one of the things that transgender folx have to figure out as they transition socially is how to alter what might be gendered lifelong smiling habits. If you want to be read as feminine, smile more, but also keep in mind that too much smiling in the wrong situation can be read as permission to hit on you or harass you or assault you and then afterwards have people say that you asked for it, because, YOU WERE SMILING!