Of Supers, Smiles and Siblings

I was leaving my building on a recent morning and our super said to me, "I love how you're always smiling and happy."  "Oh Frank," I said, "you aren't accounting for my acting skills, for the times I'm just faking it."  I've never been one to lie (which is a hazard, in life/work/relationships, and perhaps the subject of a future blog entry), but I also don't believe in walking around with a woe is me affect, since I don't really see the upside of being a downer to other people, especially those who aren't able to help, or can't really understand my experience(s).  So I'm left with doing my happy face routine, and truth be told, there is power in faking happy, in just smiling, even when you're feeling something different.  Because maybe that smile will translate into actually feeling something different.

And life is full of surprises, some quite wonderful.  There is this, for example:  the ways in which my autistic son is lately trying to figure out how to be helpful to another of his siblings, who is struggling.  He often asks us how he can help, and why that sibling feels a particular way--e.g., sad, anxious, angry.  It is quite miraculous really, and even a bit funny to realize that the child so long on the receiving end of help, is now the one reaching out to offer help.  It is a beautiful testament to all we don't know and cannot anticipate as parents.  Perhaps it validates my commitment to not reading parenting books, since there is none in which a chapter documenting this kind of shift would appear, and would anticipate or speak to my experience.  Because it's entirely possible that this flowering of my son's awareness, of his budding empathy for his sibling, never would have materialized.  So to have looked forward to it, because some parenting "expert" said it would happen, and to have it not happen, would have been twice devastating.

So instead, I try to be open to the vagaries and mysteries of parenting, as exhausting and sometimes deflating as they might be.  Because sometimes, what prompts me to "fake it" mutates into something that makes my smile the very thing a casual observer--or a building super--might take it to be:  a sign of contentment, of joy, perhaps even of outright happiness.