First, it looks like she's going to make one of those sad puppy faces. Then you see her eyebrows and forehead curl. And lastly, the corners of her lips start to point down.
We call it the "curly smile" and our mother gets it quite often--especially in light of one of her three offspring enlisting in the Army. The smile usually presents itself before the waterworks.
It's nothing new to us. A good Wal-Mart commercial, "Toy Story 3", walking anywhere near a college campus, thinking about her children growing up--basically, anything can make the woman cry that has any sort of emotion attached to it. This smile has come across her face a lot more frequently since 2010. Not only did we graduate high school and start our adult lives, but Sam went off to the Army that June.
A lot of people chalk this up to being a woman, emotional and it being "that time of the month again" among other things. You can use all of those stereotypes if you wish, but you will be completely wrong. These people are just called mothers, and I'd imagine it's one of the hardest jobs on the planet.
That woman cries and gets the curly smile almost as though smiling is going out of style, and who can blame her? You have one kid in the Army about to be deployed to the Middle East, one off at college seven hours away and another one about to enter high school. Each child brings their own set of worries for a mother to think about all day, every day. And those worries are separate from her own life issues she has to deal with.
In the movie, "I Don't Know How She Does It", Sarah Jessica Parker's character talks about being a mother and balancing her family, work and personal life while having two young children. Whether her stats are true or not, she mentioned a surprising statistic--60 percent of mothers don't sleep through the night. Sounds pretty accurate to me.
With all they have to worry about--kids across the country, kids leaving the country, kids growing up even close to home--can we really say we're surprised? I don't think so.
Sixty percent of mothers might not sleep through the night, but I think we can all say 100 percent of mothers are culprits of getting the curly smile. And you know what? We really can't blame them. We can only hand them tissues, give them hugs and tell them we'll be back soon.
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