Monday, November 08, 2004

32 and Still Teething


One of the teachers wears braces, and I asked her for how long she still had to wear them. We got to talking and I remembered again that I wore braces, including an external brace, for all of my years in high school.

I can look back at that today and say that is an incredibly damaging thing, especially when the duration is over several years, to put a teenager through.

I wore them virtually 23 hours a day, every day, in order to get it over with sooner rather than later. I was only required to wear it for a minimum of 14 hours. When I visited the orthodontist he often seemed confused, asking the nurses repeatedly, "Are we opening or closing these gaps?" Despite my dedication to wearing them, I wore braces for seven years, and the external braces for five. That is a prison term.

And this was at a time when an individual finds an identity and I think I was hiding away and waiting for my facial prison term to be over. I did not grow in those years, and maybe I only have myself to blame. Because if anything, I withered. The kid I was before and the person I was after are quite different. And I think wearing this external contraption all the time had a lot to do with that. I became very quiet, withdrawn and obviously was exposed to a lot of ridicule, probably on a daily basis. How do people react to constant humiliation?

I am 32 years old and I sometimes still wake up having a dream that I have lost my braces or broken something. The worst thing is that I had to wear the braces because two wisdom teeth were pulled out right next to the two centre teeth on the upper row. What kind of dentist pulls the first, second or even third pair? These teeth determine your appearance and give you your smile. I wonder what possessed my parents to permit it. There are plenty of other teeth to pull to make space in the mouth. They are not what you see when you smile,they are just fill in teeth. So, having created these gaps right there where you can see them, they spent about 7 years trying to close them.

It makes me go a bit crazy when I think about it. It makes me think that you cannot always trust of rely on adults, including your parents. Sometimes you have to see what the effects of things will be for yourself, and not hope that someone elses decision is a good one.

I am working on a children's book called I AM GETTING BRACES. In it I hope to tell my story as a kind of cautionary tale, and children can get some sense of empathy and support in knowing that what they will go through is nothing compared to what I did. Posted by Hello

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