mind the gap

This blog is coming from the steamy, loud, rather damp bathroom in our little house. The girls are making potions in the bath and I am perched atop the closed toilet trying to get this blog written before the the arguing starts along with the the waterworks.

Once the girls were safely in the tub and before writing this blog, I quickly grabbed my toothbrush and did a quick post-dinner brush. I was reminded as I brushed my teeth, that on Thursday of this week, I get to pick up the whitening trays that I have had made at my dentist office. That's right, I am bleaching my teeth and I am as excited as I was when I got the gap in my front teeth fixed at the age of 16.

I have always been a teeth person. It is one of the first things I notice when I meet someone. Being a tooth-gal, the fact that my own adult teeth were far from perfect was a constant niggle in my teenage life. Sure, they were straight and not a terrible colour but they weren't sparkling white and worst of all, I had a large gap between my two front teeth. I willed that gap away from the time I was about 12 until I finally got them fixed when I was 16. Not only did I will that gap away but I resorted to some pretty new-fangled torture to fix the gap myself.

My favourite "fix" was when I would take little elastics and put them around both front teeth as tightly as I could and leave them overnight. In the morning, when I would take the elastic off, I would swear that I could feel that my teeth had moved closer together. They would always hurt a little bit. This was a good thing, wasn't it? It was strange that the gap didn't ever look any smaller. My other fix, not as saavy, but certainly something I thought made me look far more appealing, was the "chewed-up-piece-of-kleenex, tucked-between-my-teeth" plan. I was sure that with that carefully placed softened Kleenex between my teeth that everyone would see me with perfect ivory Chicklets not the "spit-gap" teeth that stared back at me every night in the mirror.

When I was 16 my parents, who clearly did not understand how horrible my life had been because of my teeth, said that I could have my gap filled with a new technique the dentist was doing. Within an hour of being in the dentist chair, my gap, my albatross, was gone. I could not stop smiling. When I returned to school with my new becoming smile it was all I could do not to smile at the water fountains.

The realization that we are our own worst critic was my lesson at this time in my life, since all the people I smiled at with my new teeth finally started saying "what are you smiling about?" to which I replied "My teeth!! They are fixed! Don't you see??!". The answers from every single person and even a couple of water fountains was "really? I didn't notice that you had a gap?!"