For as long as I can remember, my mother has smiled. Whether she was waving goodbye to my siblings and I as our dad picked us up for the weekend, or to me when she dropped me off at my freshman-year dorm, my mom has always smiled. For a while, I didn’t question my mother’s happiness or friendliness; I assumed her level of friendliness was normal and expected it. However, as I have grown up and started to form a life of my own, separate from my family, I have realized that this might not be the case.
My mother has always taught me to value kindness and sympathy. If I were having an issue with a friend, my mom is always the first person to encourage me to “see it from their perspective.” In the moment, these sorts of conversations always annoyed me. I would often wonder why my mom couldn’t just be on my side, see it from my perspective. That being said, I don’t think that there will ever be enough words in any language to express my gratitude for the way that my mom raised me.
In my opinion, female friendships are one of, if not the most important thing that a woman can experience in her lifetime. The way that I see it, your girlfriends are the people who will be there for you no matter what. This might be a fault of my own, but I know that my friendships with girls will outlive any romantic relationship I have. I think that this perspective, along with how my mom raised me to act, is why my instinct will always be to be kind to any woman I interact with. Whether that be a smile or my tone of voice, I will never see a reason to not be kind and friendly to another woman.
So, it seems, I’m always smiling. I smile at the girl who accidentally bumps into me in the dining hall, and I smile at my professor when the rest of the class loses interest in what she is saying. It wasn’t until I came to college that I realized that people my age don’t really smile anymore. We smile at our friends, and we smile at our family, but when it comes to random people we might interact with, we don’t.
I don’t know if I’m just overly sensitive, but it seems like we as a generation have become less friendly, maybe even less kind. It is also totally possible that smiling is not an accurate way to measure the friendliness of a certain group of people. It could be that social media and various other modes of communication have taken over our brains, and there’s no need to interact with random people in person; there are hundreds of thousands of strangers online for us to interact with.
At the end of the day, my mother deserves all of the credit for my observations of the world around me, because she encouraged this kind of deep thought. I will always owe the woman I am today to my beautiful, smiling mother.
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