My love-hate relationship with my teeth goes back to when I was a kid. Of course, as with most things in my life, it really began before I was born, I just didn't know that until I was much older. Of course.
If I haven’t mentioned it yet, I was the poor kid growing up. The one with the hand-me-down clothes, the bad haircut, the free lunch card, and especially the bad teeth. And when I say “bad,” I mean that in the worst possible interpretation of the word. My teeth were horrible. My mother insisted it was because she took iron supplements while she was pregnant with me, but I have since debunked that theory thanks to a 10 second Google search. I had bad teeth because I didn’t brush my teeth. And I didn’t brush my teeth because neither of my parents made me. And they didn’t make me because neither of them seemed to think very highly of dental hygiene since they both had bad teeth, too. Because their parents had all lost their teeth, so that’s what happened—you lost your teeth.
But I didn’t know all this then. I just knew my teeth were not pretty like the people I saw on television, or like the teeth of the other kids at school. I didn’t eat a lot of candy or sweets. I would have if I’d gotten my hands on them, but we didn’t have money for frivolous things like that, and about the only sweet we ever made at home was peanut butter fudge because we always had peanut butter in the house, since we were on welfare and received commodities from the government. Now, there was candy at Halloween, and that was the one time every year when I’d go apeshit over candy.
Like I said, though—candy wasn’t really my problem. Not brushing my teeth was.
I hated brushing my teeth. I also hated taking a bath and I hated washing my hair. Thinking back on myself as a recalcitrant, hygiene-averse kid, I imagine I smelled similar to the way our Catahoula smells when she’s found something dead out in the backyard and rolls around in it, then gets rained on. In other words: unpleasant. Not surprisingly, my mother never forced me to bathe, either. It was whatevs to her, I guess.
There comes a time in every intelligent child’s development, though, when they realize not brushing their teeth and not bathing regularly isn’t sustainable. The other kids usually help, with appropriate nicknames or what have you. I was, luckily, spared those. Other kids weren’t, and even I joined in on the name calling. Those kids actually smelled, though. I didn’t smell. Or, rather, I couldn’t smell myself and therefore deduced that I did not smell. This was third grade. I was eight.
The next year, I switched schools and started noticing cute boys. I didn’t want the cute boys to make fun of me, so I started bathing regularly, and styling my hair. There wasn’t much I could do about my teeth, though. I brushed them, but they were still coming in crooked. And I had fillings that actually looked like cavities themselves. Other kids got braces. I envied them because their teeth were normal, and although they were crooked, the braces would correct that. At that age, I wasn’t even losing my teeth at the rate everyone else was, so I had a mouthful of baby teeth in various stages of decay, crowded out by the few adult teeth that were growing in at odd angles. My mother asked the dentist why my teeth weren’t loosening and coming out the way other kids’—the way my older sisters’ teeth—had, and he shrugged and told her each kid was different.
But I was fourteen when I had to have my last baby tooth actually cut off one of my molars because the adult tooth had more or less grown in as a part of the baby tooth. If it sounds weird, imagine what it felt like. And there I was with a mouthful of crooked teeth, although by then, I was brushing daily and flossing… well, let’s just say occasionally. I hated the way it felt and it made my gums bleed when I did it, and I hated the way the blood tasted. Anyway… yeah. Bad teeth.
When you’re the poor kid in elementary and middle school, it’s kind of obvious. But when you’re the poor kid in high school, it’s REALLY obvious. First of all, you’re riding the bus. Other kids get dropped off by their mom or their older sibling drives them in, but the poor kids ride the bus and everyone knows it. Because the bus stops right in front of the fucking school and everyone sees you get off the goddamned thing. Then they notice your clothes. Like, they have a real Members Only jacket and you have whatever the JC Penney version of it was. Other kids wear Sebagos and you wear the knock-offs. Other kids get braces, and you’re stuck with your shitty teeth because everyone else’s parents work for the government in Oak Ridge and yours don’t, so there’s no dental insurance for stuff like that. Plus, you still aren’t really taking care of your teeth the way you should, because it hasn’t dawned on you that it’s the only set you’ll ever have.
My twenties were the X-rated version of my teens, for the most part. Like, not much was different, except I didn’t have to drive out of the way to buy cigarettes from the one gas station that would sell to me without carding me. And I could have sex with guys at my apartment whenever, instead of waiting until their parents were out of town. Or giving them a blow job in their car with the gear shift punching me in the ribs. I bathed daily and chose my outfits with care. I got professionals to cut my hair. I had a skincare routine. But my teeth were still crooked and I still only flossed whenever I got something stuck between my teeth. I think I went to the dentist once during my twenties.
In my thirties, though, my wisdom teeth finally started to grow in and it was excruciating. Like, I would wake in the middle of the night because of the pain. I was making pretty decent money by then, so I figured I’d hit up a dentist. He was totally nonplussed when I told him I hadn’t visited a dentist since I was maybe twenty-five. He said my teeth were in surprisingly good shape for someone who rarely flossed and hadn’t been to a dentist in almost ten years. “Yeah, but they’re ugly,” I told him. He assured me he’d seen worse, and he said there were lots of things he could do to make them pretty—after I’d had the wisdom teeth extracted.
So, he referred me to a surgeon and I got the wisdom teeth removed and I went back to the dentist and told him I was ready for braces and, while we were at it, could he change out all my metal fillings with the ones that looked like they weren’t fillings at all? He gave me brochures and links to websites. I worried about the amount of time I’d spend in braces. He told me he only did Invisalign and that he’d have me out of them in less than two years. I called him a liar. I laughed when I said it, but I believed he was lying.
Then came the part about money.
Having always been poor, and after I clawed my way up from “poor” to “merely struggling,” the cost of things always took some time for me to process. So, four grand for the braces, after paying almost that much for the wisdom teeth extraction and all the office visits associated with that, plus roughly two grand more for the fillings AND another grand for a crown… yeah, I thought I was having an anxiety attack. So, by the end of it all, I will have forked over eleven thousand dollars so I wouldn’t have bad teeth. And the funny thing is, I had to think about it! Not for long mind you, but still.
What I decided to do was spread everything out. I’d had the wisdom teeth extraction, so as soon as my jaw and gums were healed from that, we’d do the crown. I’d save up money and start on the fillings—the bottom teeth first, since they showed more in photos than the top teeth. After that, I’d save up and get the top fillings done… THEN we could start on the Invisalign. I still didn’t believe he’d have me in and out of them in under two years. My teeth were busted. I wasn’t kidding myself.
So that’s just what I did, and ten years later, I had Good Teeth™. I could smile and show them, that’s how much of a change there was. And I actually cried when I got fitted with my last set of Invisalign trays.
This all sounds vain, and I know that, and I guess maybe I am, but if you’ve never had bad teeth, you can’t understand how it affects everything about you and your life. Even after I’d left school behind and kids weren’t around to bully me about being poor and ugly, there were still spaces where my teeth excluded me. Like the dating sites. These were what we had before the advent of dating apps. And honestly, they’re exactly the same thing. The only difference is that apps are on a phone and you take your phone everywhere you go, whereas the sites were only on the internet, and most people didn’t shlep a laptop with them everywhere they went back then. So, you’d have to wait until you got off work at the end of the day to rush home and log into your Gay.com profile and browse all the guys who were out of your league. Or who acted like they were out of your league, at any rate. And one of the recurring themes in the majority of profiles on those websites was “No bad teeth.”
So I didn’t get a lot of play. Or, let me rephrase that: I got a lot of play, but no one wanted to date me. Because if they dated me, they’d have to be seen with me, and wherever I went, my crooked teeth had to come along. And no one wanted to be seen with someone with Bad Teeth. “Don’t talk to her,” they’d hiss to one another. “She’s poor! She can’t even fix her teeth!”
Well, I fixed my fucking teeth. I’m married now, so I can’t even do anything to get all those bitchy queens back, but it really doesn’t even matter. I can smile in public. I can show my teeth in photographs. I guess I’ll always be The Poor Kid. I don’t think that ever goes away. The price of things will always make me think twice—or three, four, five times. But I have good teeth now, and that’s something, right?