False Teeth, False Beliefs
How a lifetime of weird childhood memories stole my joy- until it didn’t
I’ve decided that last Friday’s writing, where I mentioned my mom talking shit about my smile, deserves its own post. No, not to tell you about how aggrieved I am… woe is me!!…. but to delve into it a bit deeper.
I know exactly why I’m salty about what she said, and I think this is a great example of the kind of things I talk about here at my Substack, “Less Than You Think”
Let me set the scene for you. Apparently, Baby Bonnie was a fussy baby and would only quiet down when she had Kool-Aid. She got a lot of Kool-Aid because she was so cranky. So, at two years old, she had to have her top, front four teeth pulled due to baby bottle syndrome, aka tooth decay. 🍼🦷😬 Do yourself a favor and DO NOT Google Image Search that phrase. Also, it’s super fun to know you were such a pain in the ass that you gave yourself tooth decay! 😳
The years progress, and she has to get false teeth so she “doesn’t develop a speech impediment”. (That’s enough third-personing.) The false teeth were permanent, but always felt like they were going to come out, so it was quite the buzzkill. I remember walking out in the woods on our 195-acre dairy farm with my older brother and feeling like they were going to come out, so I said I wanted to turn around and go home. Then they would feel fine and normal, so I’d want to keep walking. A few minutes later, they’d feel loose again, and I’d want to turn back, back around. I didn’t tell him my concern, though, and suffered in silence for some weird kid reason.
Then, in 4th grade, I told a boy classmate at Vandalia Christian Academy that I was born in Germany, and he said, “That must be why you talk so funny.” What?! I talk funny??? OMG my fears were coming true! I got false teeth too late! I already didn’t smile with my teeth showing because I was embarrassed by all the years of having a huge gap in my teeth and rounds of “all I want for Christmas is my FOUR front teeth” being sung at me. Now, with false teeth somewhat firmly embedded, I am still betrayed by my cure-all teeth… by the way I talk?! 😱
So, when my mom texted me “I love how you aren’t making weird faces now,” when I sent her a photo of me on our road trip, I lost my mind. She already said something similar weeks earlier that made me twitchy. I sent her a photo of my wife and me on the day we were “just looking“ and unexpectedly found the RV we ended up buying, and she said, “Why do you silly girls always hang your mouths open? It would be such a pretty picture with mouths smiling. Lol”
I swallowed the venom and just said, “That’s our excited faces.” To which she replied, “I guess I never get that excited!” Says the woman who has won thousands of dollars in jackpots at the slots 🎰💸🤑💰 But, also, how sad that you never get that excited.
And then, I realized what she said wasn’t even about me. She had particular ideas about what is “natural” or “normal” for a photo. She’s in her mid-seventies, so maybe it’s a generational thing. She also told me she doesn’t like it when people stick their tongues out in photos. (Note to self for upcoming photos to send her 🤪). This is the same woman who takes her glasses off for every photo in the last 30 years, even though she wears glasses 100% of the time. This isn’t about me.
She didn’t know that I had years of self-conscious thoughts about my teeth and smile, and when she said these things, I felt like I was transported back to 1985 and was that ashamed, dirty-faced, toothless kid again. But why dirty-faced, Bonnie? Another fun result from not having front teeth is this: when your favorite ice cream flavor is Baskin-Robbins’ Peanut Butter and Chocolate, and you don’t have front teeth, you have to bite the ice cream with the side of your mouth, and you end up looking like a chocolate-mouthed clown. 🎂🍦🤡 Which, turns out, was often something other people liked to laugh about. Damn, I’m realizing I was a sensitive kid!
Another uncomfortable smile-related thing that has come up is that now that I’ve lost 100+lbs, I realized that I was also self-conscious about my smile in a different way. 100 pounds ago, I thought my face was too fat when I smiled, and I subconsiously developed an open-mouthed smile because I thought it made my face not so fat. Even my mom mentioned she thought I was smiling differently now that I lost weight. And she was right! I was self-conscious about my “fat smile face”! How sad for me!! Even in moments of joy, I’m having habitual, unhelpful thinking about my smile. Here I am having a great life and I’m overthinking it with how my damn face looks in a photo!?
Even weeks later, before I take a selfie, I think about my smile. Yep, RENT FREE IN MY HEAD! 🏡🚫💵 Maybe my face did look fat in photos. But that was my face. It’s more important to me to be authentic than curated, but that doesn’t mean the thoughts don’t pop into my mind. It’s literally habitual. I have all my teeth, I am the weight I am. This is not something I should be thinking about now, right? WTF does it even matter? Why are you doing this to me, thoughts?
This is exactly what I mean when I ask, What if there’s nothing wrong with us, and this whole time, the noise of our spinning wheels has been covering up our own voice that is full of wisdom, direction, and clarity? What if there was nothing wrong with my smile this whole time? Of note, no one has actually ever told me my smile was effed up, btw. But, what if my smile was perfect, exactly how it was in each moment of time throughout the years? In fact, my mom said she was actually complimenting my smile. Even though that’s the opposite of what I heard, I don’t think she meant it how I took it.
The thoughts I had about myself, carried through time by memories, created my reality. We do this with everything. But when we realize that we are living in the feeling of our thinking, not the feeling of our circumstances, we get a second chance at life.
This is the kind of thing I work with clients on – seeing you’re not broken, understanding how thought works, getting unstuck. If you’d like to talk about what you’re going through, I offer a free initial call to see if coaching might help. Send me a message here.