The Thin Lipped Smile

I’m a very sentimental person, as most of you who read this blog have come to know. So it should be no shock to you that I keep every single greeting card I am ever given. Every thoughtful note. Every sweet photo. I keep them all in boxes that have been overflowing now for years. I have been putting off the task of organizing these boxes for no particular reason other than that I knew it was going to be a big job. But with being at home instead of at a job for the last few months (a story for another day), I’ve been able to pick up those tedious tasks that I just didn’t seem to have the energy for before. 

I began going through piles of photos from my childhood, my husband’s childhood, and my daughter’s childhood. Old photos we’d been given of family members who had passed on. Dozens of photos I had snapped of Madison as she toddled around doing toddler things. And a huge collection of photos from the first two years I spent with my grandparents. 

When I was about 6 months old, my mother was in a car accident on an interstate in Utah. She was in dead stop traffic, and was rear ended by a 13 passenger bus. She suffered with head trauma in the accident and began to experience chronic short term memory loss shortly after. By her account, she would do things like leave the water running or the keys in the lock in the front door or she’d forget that she had turned the stove on. So it was decided that I would go and live with my maternal grandparents in California while my mother went through rehabilitation for her injuries. 

I lived with them from the time I was 6 months old until I was almost 3. They showered me in love. I truly don’t have many vivid memories from that time, but I can deeply remember the feeling of being loved by my grandparents. My grandmother was a very loud, vivacious, independent, beautiful woman. Her favorite animal was the peacock and she embodied it completely. I have photos of all of the various outfits my grandmother would wear, matching her look from her hat down to her shoes. She was fabulous, and we were crazy about each other.

When I was about 3, my mother came to get me from my grandparents. The ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’ of the decision she made are for another day, but to put a long story short, someone had given her the perspective that a good mother would have her child with her, not staying with her parents. And so she came to California to take me to live with her. 

My grandmother was a mess. I was a mess. My mother has told me over the years how much I cried when we were separated. My grandmother and I had an undeniable connection, and that’s when, I’ve come to believe, my mother’s jealousy of me first really began. 

These memories I’ve just described to you I’ve gotten from pieces my mother has told me over the years, and old photographs. I have a few memories of when my grandmother would send me and my younger brother monthly care packages; full of our favorite cereals, toys, movies, and whatever goodies she could spoil us with. I remember her taking me to see Hercules in the theaters, and I remember how much she fueled my love for Disney. And I remember being with her the day that she fell in the grocery store parking lot and couldn’t get back up. Several bystanders came to help her to her feet, and our day went on just like my grandmother always did in the face of adversity. It wouldn’t be until several months later that we would discover my beloved grandmother had the terminal disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). She died a year and a half after her diagnosis at 52 years old. 

In that last year and a half, my grandmother slowly lost everything that made her her. First she lost the ability to walk, then she lost the ability to move her arms, then her hands, before finally losing her ability to speak, and then passing on. 

Most of my memories are filled from that time. I remember sitting in my grandfather’s handicap accessible van as we circled the parking lot looking for a close space to the Trader Joe’s entrance because some asshole without a placard had parked in the handicap spot. I remember Maryanne, the sweet older hospice nurse who helped care for my grandmother in her final days. I remember the weird little machine that sat next to her favorite recliner in the living room; where she would shakily type into the keyboard what she wanted to say after she couldn’t speak the words. I remember snuggling up in that recliner with her and never wanting to leave, huddled under warm blankets with beautiful angels embroidered on them. And I remember the gut wrenching sorrow I felt the first day I arrived at her house after she passed. The recliner was still there, but it was empty. No machine, no blankets with angels, no grandma. 

As I was going through old photos of myself recently, I came across this photo. It is one of the last photos I had taken with my grandmother. She looks like a shell of the woman with coiffed bleach blonde hair and the suave and chic outfit. I cropped her out of the photo out of respect, but what struck me most when I found this is me. Little, uncomfortable me. Look at the photo I shared of my grandmother and I below, and now look at this one. I have sunglasses on to hide my eyes, my hands are clasped, and my mouth is formed into a thin lipped smile I know all too well. I looked at this expression on my face and thought “Oh…. This is when it started. This is when I started pretending I was okay when I was not.” 

Losing my grandmother was the most devastating experience of my life. And I was never able to properly grieve the loss, because of my mother’s jealousy.

Throughout my entire childhood, my mother would tell me that I loved her parents too much. They were her parents first and I had no ownership to them. When I was around 8, I had purchased a small frame for a wallet sized photo of my grandmother my mother had. It was a beautiful little blue stained glass frame. When I gave it to her, my mother loved it. But after a few weeks she began to scold me for how often I would go to the bathroom to look at the photo, or how often I would take it to my room to sit with. “She was my mother, not yours.” 

Every discussion of my grandmother and my love for her would most likely end this way. My mother would go on about how wonderful and fabulous my grandmother was, how she spoke 6 different languages and survived homelessness and other traumatic, difficult experiences. But if I began to fawn a little too much over my grandmother’s memory, like a light switch my mother would flip. And once again, she was her mother, not mine. 

This would not be the only time my mother would alienate me from someone I loved because of her personal feelings. When I would express my love for my grandfather, she would roar about how he loved me more than he should. When I expressed wanting to live with my dad and stepmother in later years, she demonized them and made me feel like a traitor to the family for loving them. My mother alienated me from everyone who ever loved me. By the time I was 16, and living with her and my brother, I didn’t really have any family connections. She would sit next to me on the couch as I talked to my grandfather on the phone, coaching me through what to say and what not to say and listening to my every word. After we fought, she would take my phone and meticulously go through all of the text messages to make sure I had not reached out to anyone to ‘talk shit’ about her. And it wasn’t until my early 20’s that I understood that this is a tell tale sign of narcissism. They isolate you from everyone around you so you have only them. 

“No one will love you like do.”

“I’m the only one who knows you.”

“You would be lost without me.” 

For a very, very long time, I believed that. I believed that if I left my mother, she would combust. She would die. She wouldn’t be able to deal. And that leads me to the importance of the above photo. I had just seen this thin lipped smile of mine a few days before, when I was sharing a story from 2016 on my Instagram stories. 

Every morning when I am waking up, sitting on my yoga mat and getting ready for my morning routine, I take a look at the featured photos tab on my IPhone. Most of the time I’m shown sweet, forgotten memories from the literal THOUSANDS of photos I have in my gallery. However the other morning, I was shown photos from a trip I took to Colorado for Thanksgiving in 2016. During that trip, my mother, my husband, my daughter, and I all spent a night at the Stanley Hotel. 

I got very good at recognizing what emotional state my mother was in, it wasn't until years later that I learned I developed this hyper vigilance as a child to keep myself safe. It took her 4 hours to do her makeup, and we didn't leave to Estes Park (a 2 hour drive) until after dark. This was the first red flag; regardless of the fact that I wanted to show my little family the beautiful drive to Estes, I knew internally that when outings with my mother started off on the wrong foot, they usually never ended on the right foot. 

About an hour into the drive my mother exclaimed that she had left all of her medications for her various mental ailments at home. Instantly I felt panic well in my stomach, and I told her in my calmest voice that we needed to turn around and go back, and that she needed those medications. She laughed me off and told me I was being a party pooper as always. I dropped it, because my voice of reason being instantly shut down and shamed was nothing new. 

We checked into the hotel and we were all hungry. On the drive up my mother had said that we would get food at the restaurant her and my brother had gone to the last time they were there. She told me the food was great and I was going to love it!

We walked over to the restaurant that is situated right next to the check in desk, and it was a fine dining, reservations only restaurant. The area that my mother had sat in the last time was a bar, which in that moment was echoing with loud jeers and laughs and glasses hitting tables as it was a Saturday night. My mother asked me more times than comfortable if I would be okay sitting in the bar area with my 3 year old daughter, to which I repeatedly said no. She then took her frustration with me out on the hostess as she screamed at her that no one had ever told her she needed a reservation, that she should have been told that when she booked the room, that everything was closed and we would certainly starve unless they figured something out, and a bunch of other demeaning things that I blocked out. What I do remember is that the hostess finally gave in, as did everyone that I'd seen receive this treatment from my mother, and we were led to a table in the fine dining area and given an exception on our casual clothing. 

We all sat down and began to diffuse. We got the menus and my mother ordered chicken wings. For years, whenever my mother would be spending time with me, she would use it as her excuse to eat meat, whereas throughout the rest of the year she adopted my brother's vegan diet. The chicken wings were delivered, and in my perspective they looked like good, juicy, veiny, organic chicken wings. My mother was disgusted. She insisted that the veins were supposed to be removed just like in shrimp. After a few feeble attempts at telling her that I thought they looked great, I went back to quietly eating my food as my mother ripped into the waitress over the unacceptable chicken wings. The waitress offered to bring her something else, she refused, and continued drinking as we all sat there quietly finishing our meals. 

We left the restaurant and as this was the week right after Thanksgiving, there was nothing going on in the hotel apart from the rambunctious bar area. After a few minutes of walking around, my mother offered to take Madison back up to the hotel room while we walked around. "Your brother and I have already gotten to experience this, I don't mind!" And of course my husband and I graciously accepted the opportunity for alone time. Once I had said yes and thanked my mother for the offer, the energy between us changed. 

She didn't say more than a few words to me, huffed under her breath when I would speak, whispered things under her breath I couldn't make out, and would shoot looks at me when she thought I wasn't looking. This lasted until we made it up to the hotel room, when as I was changing my daughter into her pajamas, I haughtily looked at my mother and said "Is there a problem? Did I do something?" She calmly and coldly said that I was just dumping my kid on her, that she was nothing more than a glorified babysitter, that I didn't really have any interest in spending time with her, that I make her feel so alone and that this was nothing new because I had always treated her this way. 

I triggered, as anybody would who was being falsely accused in this way, and within a few minutes we were full on screaming at each other. Me screaming to try to defend myself, to try to be heard, and my mother screaming over me not letting me get a word in. Screaming to confirm her reality as she sees it and giving me no choice but to accept it. 

And as per usual for me in these situations, I had to escape. I left the room without a second thought, without my shoes. Purely in the flight trauma response I went to another spot around the corner from our room, far enough away where I felt safe, and I just sat down on the carpet. I began to breathe, get my bearings about me, and after a few minutes on the floor, I pulled myself back up to go face my mother. 

When I rounded the corner towards our room, I heard my mother shouting my husbands name and several other expletives. I saw a group of friends stopped in front of the door, hands over their agape mouths as they looked at each other. I was in my bones fucking humiliated, and if I had a coin for every time my mother had put me in this public display of drama and shame, I would be a millionaire. 

I went back into the room as soon as the people passed, my husband left with my daughter as he had been trying to do before being met with my mother blocking the door. She began screaming at me again, and at this point had devolved into all of the reasons why it was okay for her to be acting this way. You see, she has all of these mental ailments because of the difficult life she's lived and don't you get that, can't you just be more patient, really the problem is you. And I screamed back at her mom don't you realize that I ALSO have anxiety? Don't you understand how all of these things affect me? 

She wailed that she didn't want me to have anxiety, the screams turned to sobs, and she eventually crawled into a ball under the blankets on her bed where she did not apologize but asked me to not speak to her. My husband returned with my calm daughter a while later, and once she was sleeping my mother peeked out from her covers and said if we wanted to go down to the bar for adult time, she would stay with sleeping Madison. Hindsight is 20/20, and the Allie typing this would have never left her daughter in her mother's care. But at the time I was still very numbed to how abusive my mother was, and I was dying to do what I always did to deal with these uncomfortable feelings that would bubble up from childhood: drink. So we went, and of course my husband who came from a generally healthy and happy family, was beside himself with what we had just experienced. But for me, this was business as usual. 

My husband took several photos of me that night, including this one sitting at the bar. Notice anything about it? Once again, there is my tight lipped smile.

Pretending everything’s okay when it’s not. 

Afraid to acknowledge how messed up something is. 

Feeling all sorts of confusing and haunting emotions that you just smack a smile over to cover. 

“Just please let me be the wallpaper, let me be invisible, don’t mind me.”

That’s what this thin lipped smile says to me. 

There were many, MANY parts of my childhood that contributed to this people pleaser part of me that has been the hardest weed to uproot. 

But I couldn’t deny the feeling I had when I found that photo of little 6 year old Allie next to her grandmother, with this photo of 23 year old Allie after another traumatic episode with her mother still fresh in my mind. 

First I was a child who was alienated from people I loved, and then I became an adult who stayed with the people who clearly didn’t. 

These are the feelings that get stirred up, when I see some of the drama that happens when couples break up. 

I’ve witnessed friends of mine publicly trash each other on social media. I’ve sat at friends' tables as they’ve explained that their ex’s kids aren’t their problem. I’ve nervously gripped my hands as I’ve listened to a parent say they would keep their ex from seeing their child as a result of a fight between the two adults. I’ve been surrounded by many adults in my life only thinking about themselves. 

The phrase ‘Kids are resilient’ comes to mind. But what makes kids resilient? Maybe there are two types of resilience: 

There is the resilience of unconditional love. Of knowing that no matter how badly you screw up, or how selfishly you act, that there is always opportunity for repair, growth, healing. The resilience that when things are not okay, you know they will be okay. 

And then there’s the people pleaser resilience. The “I’ll smile if it means you won’t yell at me” resilience. The I’ll say sorry when I don’t really mean it to try to please you resilience.  The type of resilience born out of survival. The ‘do as I say, don’t ask questions’ resilience. 

Kids are deeply, and quickly forgiving. And in some cases when they are in a loving and supportive environment, they bounce back from things quicker than you or I would. They’re accepting, open, and they follow your lead. When they are in a different type of environment, one where feelings are met with anger and yelling and belittlement, I think at some point they learn not to speak up. You think you’re teaching them ‘listening’ but really you’re teaching them compliance. And then we say: “Kids are resilient.”  

Kids are little humans growing and learning how to be full fledged humans. They depend on us to shepherd them through this journey until they reach the gates of adulthood where we hope the lessons we’ve instilled in them carry them to success and happiness. Between the photo of 6 year old me, and the photo of 23 year old me, you can see what happens to the child who is taught compliance. 

I didn’t learn to listen, I learned to shut up. To not speak up from myself. I leaned how to people please my way into my mother’s acceptance. “If mom thinks I’m okay, and that I’m not angry or upset, then I don’t have to deal with how upset I make her with my big feelings.” 

Let me scream it from the rooftops: KIDS ARE NOT RESILIENT. Kids are little people who go through the same big things you go through, feel the same big things you do, and have 0 tools to deal with them. That’s what they’re supposed to get from you, the parent. 

2 years after that photo at the bar in the Stanley Hotel was taken, I went no contact with my mother. Ever since then it has been a non stop journey of going through every painful memory and pattern from my childhood to unlearn the toxic coping mechanisms I adopted to keep me safe. It has not been easy. And I know it will be a lifetime of learning new, deeper truths about myself and my experiences, there is no end point. 

But there was also no alternative. I only had 2 choices. Do the work and break the cycle to give my daughter emotional intelligence and a (hopefully) happy childhood, or create another thin lipped smile in my bloodline. 

Not if I have anything to say about it. It stops here, it ends with me.