FIFTH GRADE WAS ROUGH ON ME. The gold-rimmed ovals fixed themselves lopsided on my face, and untamed eyebrows reached beyond their parameters. My skin was oily, my hair was confused. “Should I be curly?” it contemplated, “Or straight?” Pausing for a moment of brief assessment, it decided it would be both— and greasy to match.
It was the dawning of a new adolescent, of awkwardness, and apparently, probably, ugliness.
The best part about this age is also the worst part. You’re too young and into your Beanie Babies and sticker collection to realize you smell like garbage, and so continue your blissfully ignorant ways. Then 2009 rolls around and you unearth that dreaded 8 x 10. You know which one I’m talking about. That’s the worst. Your friends love that moment.
I wouldn’t say I was a “babe” (that title was reserved for girls that wore tech vests and french braids) but closer to an ogre. “Confused” is a safe adjective, for lack of a softer word for “fugly.” My mom frequently had to drop hints for me to clean myself up. “Your hair…eh…might need…” It was pride that kept me a tomboy, and with gusto I deemed myself the best girl at kickball, the one advantage of my rugged sturdy legs.
Then there was the snaggle tooth.
The snaggle tooth, like sturdy legs and the semi-Dumbo ear, is another trait you’d rather not acquire from your father. My siblings, I presume, carry a secret resentment that I scored all three traits, the covetous “trifecta” of Christen attributes. My dad and I had nearly identical snaggle teeth, but his hid pretty well behind his upper lip. I was always flashing mine during a kickball match, and in hindsight, it probably instilled more fear in my opponent than I could ever imagine.
The snaggle tooth had many friends, most living across the street on my bottom jaw. Together they were a twisted and crooked pack of incisors and bicuspids, radically heinous toward the Shake and Bake and Fruit Rollups they often encountered. It was all image, gold rims and confused hair held up by sturdy legs. Surly beauty.
These things can only scare people for so long before they need to be corrected. My parents decided to start with the snaggle tooth. The day the metal was glued into my mouth, the snaggle started what was a slow decline. “What colors?” I can remember the orthodontist’s assistant asking me the first time I chose my rubber bands. I pointed to the purple and teal. “These two.” There was no other way.
At the time, braces were somewhat archaic. The glory of headgear had faded and tinsel was last season’s trend. I showed up to class, the only “brace-face” in the room (didn’t get the memo). I can vividly recall trying to eat a granola bar that afternoon at lunch, one of the most vexing experiences of my life. It honestly would have been easier to solve a Rubik’s Cube with my tongue.
“How am I supposed to eat?” I said to the other girls at the table, who looked on blankly, then continued to eat their sandwiches. They’d be sorry when I starved to death!!!
Well, I lived after I learned to eat the granola bar, graduated 6th grade and moved on to what were the most wistful and ugly years of my life. Two years down the road, in the heat of *Junior High* (OH-em-GEE), the bands were removed to reveal a straight smile. Snaggle teeth cleaned up well!
It was that day in 2001 when the orthodontist superglued more contraptions into my mouth, “post-braces braces” or somesuch. These wires’ duties were to keep the snaggle away. I was 13 at the time, and can remember him telling me that the wires would be removed “in my 20’s.”
Long after my sparkly purple butterfly retainer found it’s place in a neglected bathroom cubboard, the wires remain, waiting for me to rip them out with a Whatchamacallit bar (sidenote: Whatchamacallit registers with spell check!), or peanut brittle, or molasses—or just rip them out.
And therein my braces experience, I find room for analogy. For just as these wires have been holding each tooth in it’s place for the past eight years, acting as fixtures to ward off a crooked flood, so, too, is a day of life. What has taken years to gain, be it acceptance, respect, or simply straight teeth—one snap of a wire and it will shift all the same.
So I carry on, warding off the crooked flood.
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