From Marianne: Apparently, My Daughter Was Watching Me 😁

I'm going to be perfectly honest. One of the weirdest things about having adult children is discovering what they thought about you while you were raising them. All those years you're teaching them to say please and thank you and don’t kill each other in the back seat. Meanwhile, they're studying you.

My daughter Natalie is 36 now. She's a journalist, writer, filmmaker and has about a million other projects going. She also writes a Substack that I love.

The other day she wrote a piece called My Mouth Hurts From Smiling. And a lot of it was about me. Apparently, I smiled a lot. She wrote about growing up with a mother whose smiling face was "blasted on TV" and how I trained my kids to pose and smile on command. Yep- I’m guilty! There are about 100,000 family photographs to prove it.

But then she wondered if all that smiling was part of how I navigated my career as a young Hispanic woman in television. Like, did being charming help make men more comfortable with my authority? I read that and thought: Wow. Is that what you thought I was doing? Because I don't remember it that way at all. I don't remember consciously using my smile to get a story, please a boss or make some man more comfortable with me.

I smiled because... I smiled. It’s something I've done my whole life. My mother was a huge smiler, so maybe it's genetic. A friend once asked me, a little annoyed, why my resting face is a smile. What can I say? I have no idea. I wake up smiling.

Not only that… very often I'll be lying in bed at night, wrapped around Bob, and suddenly realize I have a huge smile on my face. Nobody's watching. I'm not trying to get a promotion. I'm asleep-adjacent. Apparently I'm just... happy. That’s probably why those self-help books that tell you to "act as if" and smile until you feel happier always get me. I'm good. If anything, I may need to dial it down.

But Natalie's essay made me wonder. Maybe she saw something I didn't. Maybe being naturally smiley did make things easier for me in a business where young women were expected to be authoritative, but not too authoritative. You know, ambitious, but still likable. I didn't think, Smile now, Marianne. This will make the men less threatened. But maybe that smile was helping me in some way. 

That's the fascinating thing about having grown children. They remember a version of you that’s not exactly the one you remember. They were watching when you didn't know they were watching and they were drawing conclusions and learning things you didn't know you were teaching. If you're lucky, they grow up and write about you on Substack so you can find out what they thought.

I thought I was just smiling. But apparently, Natalie was taking notes. I don’t know if I want to find out what else she remembers. :)

What's something your kids noticed about you that you had no idea you were doing? Hit reply and tell me — I read every response.