I was sketching this fellow and as usual, asked him to smile. He said, “When I was 15, my grandmother told me, ‘You do not have an attractive smile.'”
“I went 20 years without smiling.”
I said, “What a mean old lady. What a cruel thing to do to a kid.”
Parents and grandchildren get this wrong sometimes.
They have been known to shrink the self-worth in a child, perhaps from a wrong-headed conviction that it was their calling to drive the child to achievement rather than to encourage him or her in that direction.
I’m thinking of my friend Kathy.