Teeth
Picture a young girl in her grandparent's bathroom. She is standing on an old wooden stool, poking teeth with small fingers. Teeth that are loose, crooked--teeth not fully grown. Teeth that are different shapes and sizes. She exhales mint from freshly brushed teeth, and-and makes her way down a long, dark hallway into the spare room decorated in small stuffed animals and a vanity covered with perfume bottles and small knick-knacks from previous years.
She climbs into bed and rests her head upon the feather-filled pillow. Her grandfather enters with a glass of water, sets it upon the nightstand beside her, and sits down slowly on the bed.
“Grandpa, how old do you have to be to get braces?” the young girl asks.
“Why do you want to know?” he asks.
“I don’t like my teeth.” she answers.
“Why don’t you like your teeth?”
“They aren’t--straight. They’re crooked.”
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“They aren’t like other girls”
“They don’t have to be. Crooked teeth are what gives your smile character”
It took me almost 18 years to learn how to love my smile. I have tried many times to get braces, have made many complaints to my dentist, begging them to do something, but each time, they responded with, “there’s not much we can do” or, “your smile is gorgeous naturally” I would argue and say that there has to be something. I’ve seen even the worst teeth straighten into perfectly aligned rows. My bottom row is like an old picket fence--jagged and crooked, pointed out. Whenever I smile, I smile small because I don’t know what others will say about it. When I laugh, I try to only giggle. My emotions have always been contained inside of a smile I never wanted to show.
Someone would go to take a photo, and I would slowly raise my face so that both edges pulling enough to allow me to smile with no teeth showing, and I would always be told to “actually smile”. (by the way, how does one actually smile?) I felt that if I didn’t feel confident enough to smile, why was I forced to do it? It wasn’t going to make me love it anymore (not that I loved it anyways) It has always seemed to me that the ones who compliment you the most and tell you not to worry about certain aspects of your natural features are the same ones with the natural features that you envy. I have always thought that people like them were made to say that--like it was a part of their job description.
Smiles come in different sizes. Small, big, creases, no creases, soft lips, chapped ones, shiny teeth, dull ones--so much variety. Of course, I know, just like with any other feature, different people have different preferences. However, I have learned to love mine. Whenever I smile, I smile wide because I am proud of what my teeth represent. When I laugh, my laugh echoes off like thunder and I snort. My teeth aren’t perfect, and they probably never will be, and I’m perfectly okay with that now. After all, it’s what gives me character.
