Teething

I notice when people’s teeth aren’t white and straight. I can’t deny it. Smiling in America is a sign of friendliness, approachableness, and social awareness, and it is almost expected in every human interaction. We grow concerned if our companion isn’t smiling. Is he mad? Is she sad? Something must be wrong. We want to see those pearly whites!

But I am not writing to discuss the mores of smiling in American society. I am currently more interested in the physical stuffs of the smile—the teeth.

I was about seven and my left front tooth was working its way loose. Like most children, I was afraid of the pain possibly involved with having a tooth pulled; therefore, I didn’t want to brush it, and I certainly wasn’t going to let anyone touch it, especially my mother, who told me it wouldn’t hurt that much to pull. Yanking a tooth out of my gums not hurt? I refused to believe her. The incarcerated tooth kept trying to escape the prison of my mouth until finally it hung by one, thin thread of tissue. Still my lips kept sentinel.

We were driving to my mother’s parents’ house in St. Paul, Minnesota and had decided to make it a two day trip. I remember sitting in the back seat of our mini-van, awkwardly eating McDonald’s French fries to avoid the use of my front teeth. We stopped at a Best Western Hotel for the night. Once inside and settled, my mother practiced her parental authority and told me the tooth had to come out. She was probably worried about my grandmother’s reaction to the tooth. Why would my grandmother react badly? Well, because when my mother seated my wiggling, squirming body on the sink counter and swiftly pulled the tooth (which didn’t hurt at all), we discovered that the once pearly white baby tooth had rotted clean through. A small pinprick of light forced its way through the hole in the middle of the tooth, which was disturbing shades of black and green.

I was horrified. My parents had let the tooth rot in my head! I asked my mom years later why she’d let this happen. She replied that it was a mixture of laziness and good parenting. “Experience is the teacher,” she told me. Let your daughter do something gross and then let her find out how gross it really was. She’ll never ever do it again. It worked. After that, loose baby teeth didn’t stay in my mouth for long. My parents tried a similar approach on my brother, and he just ended up with dirty teeth and an abhorrence for toothpaste. Independence is a gift difficultly given to children.

My brother, Edward, is an anomaly, having always struggled with consistent dental hygiene; yet, my sisters, Mary and Clara, and I have brushed religiously. Mary remembers a song that Dad used to sing when she was little, “Brush your teeth every night.  Brush your teeth, do it right.  Don't want to get any cavities.” I wonder why he didn’t sing this to me as my loose tooth sat rotting. Probably because he knew the tooth would come out soon anyways. Perhaps he did sing me the song, and I just don’t remember. Regardless, I got the message because I’ve never had a cavity (I don’t count the rotten tooth catastrophe). I am the only child to exist thus far cavity free.  Mary experienced the negative effects of gum disease, getting her first cavity at fifteen. Clara despaired when she got her first cavity around nine or ten because this meant that she didn’t get to have her Polaroid taken for the No Cavities Club at the dentist’s office. I still have all my Polaroid pictures distinguishing me as a No Cavities Club member in a photo album.

Then came those preteen and teenage years that bring braces. My mother informed me recently that not getting braces for her children was never an option. It was just something that would happen, no question. My mother says that braces are “good for mental health,” especially for self-conscious teenagers, even if they are gotten for mostly cosmetic reasons. Having straight, white teeth makes me feel that I can smile widely and proudly.

Not getting braces wasn’t an option for my mother either. Her parents wanted braces for her and her brother, my Uncle Rob. She had many friends with braces, and she tells me that it didn’t seem uncommon to have braces in the early 1970s.

 My family’s braces legacy goes back to my mother’s mother, who had braces almost sixty-five years ago in the late 1940s. Getting braces then was pretty uncommon, and my great-grandmother had to drive Granny sixty miles to Waco, TX for her orthodontist appointments. When I asked her about her braces, she told me that they were a great gift because even though it was uncommon and somewhat expensive, her teeth were so crooked from overcrowding that her parents made the financial sacrifice to get them for her. In fact, one of her front teeth stuck straight out and showed even when her mouth was closed. Overall, she had eight teeth pulled before the braces could even begin their straightening work. My maternal grandfather, blessed with straight teeth, never got braces.

My paternal grandparents never got braces either but not because their teeth were straight. Operating under an assumption my father calls a “frontier idea,” my paternal grandfather had all his teeth pulled in his forties and was fitted for dentures. He’s spent half his life without his original teeth. Pulling teeth midway through life was standard practice in the setting where my grandfather grew up, out in west Texas. With limited opportunities for education, most people didn’t take as good a care of their teeth as is common practice today. It was probably less painful in the long run to just get the teeth pulled. My paternal grandmother, however, took better care of her teeth, only needing partial dentures.

My father got braces to fix the large gap he had in between his two front teeth, which kept other teeth from growing in properly. Growing up in a similar but more urban setting as his father, my father didn’t know many other kids with braces. In lower-middle class sections of Fort Worth, money did not usually go toward getting braces. But my father and his parents didn’t want the gap to persist, so they decided to go forward with braces. His older sister, my Aunt Kathy, did not have them.

My parents passed on certain genes that gave all four of their children crooked teeth. We expected braces as a course of life. My sisters and I all went to the same orthodontist (my brother got to go to the wife of our pastor, who owned a practice an hour’s drive away). We didn’t especially like Dr. Mann, the tall, skinny, seemingly cold orthodontist who every couple of weeks tightened our braces and sent us home in pain. He hardly said anything while he tightened and attached more metal to our mouths.

Mary and Clara have their own painful stories. Mary began visiting Dr. Mann when she was nine, who installed an appliance to widen the top of her mouth. Three years later and four teeth fewer, she got her braces, which she had for two years. Clara also had an appliance. It sat attached in her mouth for nine months, fixing her cross-bite; then came almost three years of braces.  Edward’s braces were a gift from our pastor’s wife. His experience was at least a friendlier one without Dr. Mann.

I not only had braces on my upper and lower sets of teeth, I had a tongue cage appliance (akin to a medieval torture device). I needed it because my tongue was in the way, keeping my lateral incisors (those teeth in between the front teeth and the canines) from growing down properly. So I was supposed to rest my tongue in the four prongs that extended back into my mouth in a slight upward curve from just behind my upper incisors and canines. My tongue would then be out of the way so the incisors could finish growing. I’m not sure why Dr. Mann didn’t make the prongs blunt on the ends. Instead, they were sharp and pointy, which didn’t encourage the resting of my tongue on them. Playing French horn was a horrible nightmare for a while, until I figured out how to tongue beneath the cage.

The cage came out after I swallowed one of the prongs while eating a sandwich with my grandmother in Barnes and Noble. Dr. Mann removed the cage, but I still had a year of braces. He gave me other gifts to make up for the loss of the cage, two sets of head gear (to be worn while sleeping) and rubber bands (to be worn constantly).

But viola! All the Sanders children have straight teeth. For roughly $4,000 a pop (except for Edward’s, which were gift), Dr. Mann manipulated our teeth into straightness. Although expensive, my mother told me it wasn’t a big strain because the orthodontist used a long term payment plan.

I like my straight teeth. I like the way my smile looks. I like that they look clean.

When I talked to my mother about teeth recently, she admitted something to me. Every month at our church’s community meal, she said, I can’t help but make unconscious judgments about people’s class, hygiene, education, and even intelligence based on what their teeth look like. Like my mom, I also make little judgments about people based on their teeth. Much of what I think depends on context. For example, my mother’s judgments stem from the context of the community meal, which works to feed people who are hungry and poor. If I saw a person at school who had never had braces I wouldn’t think, “Poor, uneducated, no hygiene.” I probably wouldn’t think anything at all.

 But in reality, these little judgments are, for the most part, unconscious. Part of me wants to claim that I’m very judgmental and superficial and make rash judgments about people’s crooked teeth. But I think that would be an exaggeration. I either look at people and think nothing or, more commonly, look at people and think, “beautiful.” To me, everyone is beautiful, whether or not they have crooked teeth. The person behind the teeth is more interesting to me.

Is having braces more like having laser eye surgery or plastic surgery? Are the reasons for braces health related or cosmetic? Why am I still attracted to straight-toothed smiles when I think all people are beautiful? An article on the Better Homes and Gardens website tells me that only about fifteen percent of orthodontic patients need braces because the overcrowding of their teeth causes chewing problems or pain. The other eighty-five percent just like the look of straight teeth. I’m in the eighty-five percent. When my braces came off my junior year of high school, I thought I looked older, better, more sophisticated.

Straight teeth might also become an unvoiced recommendation for some jobs. A business executive or PR manager might depend on their flashy smiles to smooth out deals, contacts, or agreements. A study on who buys the most whitening strips might be interesting. Business women and men? Students? Celebrities?

Arguably, straight teeth also fall into a category of expected appearance norms, right up there with no unibrows, facial or leg hair for women, or large, visible moles. We take our bodies and tell them that what they came up with naturally isn’t good enough. I am not referring to sickness or disease, simply the ways in which all our bodies work that we then reject on a basis of standardized beauty. It doesn’t matter that women are mammals; that leg hair has to go.

I dislike some of these norms but follow them anyways. I can’t deny that I like the feel of smooth legs and the nice lines of straight teeth. I want two eyebrows, not one. I participate and resist, existing as a paradox within my own society. I’m sure I’ll pass on crooked genes to my kids, too, and when they’re old enough, they’ll go to the orthodontist, too.