Why I Smiled

Today, the packers came. Tomorrow is officially moving day.

One of them was intense. High-strung might be a better word. He talked fast, moved fast, and more than once I heard him berate the young man working alongside him. Loudly. Within earshot, as if I wasn’t standing right there.

At some point, he started telling me about his morning. It hadn’t gone well. He was stressed. I listened. I smiled. I was pleasant. His music was playing louder than I would’ve liked, filling a house that used to be peaceful, but I didn’t say anything about that either.

I just smiled.

And somewhere in the middle of all that smiling, I realized what I was doing. I was remembering another moving day.

Years ago, I hired movers to take me from one house to another. One of the men was quite the personality. He fancied himself a comedian. He joked. He talked. He entertained himself and anyone else willing to be entertained. He was doing a lot more talking than moving.

I wasn't entertained. Not because I was angry. It was simple math. The new owners were taking possession at 3:00, it was already 1:00, and we were nowhere near finished.

I didn't complain. I didn't tell him to stop talking. I didn't even tell him his jokes weren't funny. I simply wasn't laughing.

Finally, he asked me, "Why are you so serious? You haven't laughed at any of my jokes. Why don't you at least smile?"

I told him the truth. "Because there's nothing to smile about. We're running out of time. I need all of this done."

That was enough. He became angry. Belligerent. Cussed me out. Announced that he wasn't moving another damn thing, got into the truck and left. My belongings sat piled on the front lawn.

There I stood on a Saturday, at the end of the month, with my whole life out on the grass, new owners on their way, and no movers. I eventually found another company to finish the job.

Apparently, I learned something that day.

Today, all these years later, another man stood in my home. And I'd already watched how he treated that young man. I knew exactly where his stress would land if it found a new target. There was no room in the schedule for somebody's feelings to derail the plan.

So I smiled. Not because anything was particularly funny. Not because I felt especially cheerful. And certainly not because a grown woman needs to make herself pleasant so that a grown man can comfortably do the job he's being paid to do.

I smiled because I remembered what happened the last time I didn’t. That's a strange thing to realize about yourself.

As women learn these little negotiations so well that sometimes we don't even recognize we're making them. We soften our voices. We choose our words. We add a smile to a sentence that doesn't require one. We decide whether correcting someone is worth what might follow.

We calculate.

And the irony wasn't lost on me. He was comfortable displaying his displeasure. I was carefully containing mine. Because we've lived long enough to know that another person's bruised ego can become our problem very quickly.

There's a difference between submission and strategy.

I could have told this man to turn his music down. I could have stopped smiling. I decided getting through the day mattered more. And if I'm honest, the woman who stood on that lawn years ago, surrounded by everything she owned and no way to move it, had a say in that decision too.

Maybe that's wisdom. Maybe it's conditioning. Maybe it's a little of both.

But I keep coming back to one question: How many things have women learned to quietly manage, not because we should have to, but because somewhere along the way we learned what can happen when we don't?

Today, I smiled. Tomorrow, I'll move.

And when the last box is safely where it belongs, I think I'll let my face do whatever the hell it wants.