At one Sunday dinner at my Mom’s place, I found out that my nephew has some of the same teeth missing and replaced that I do. I wasn’t surprised as he is a hockey player and has been so since he was very young. I figured that was how it happened.

But it wasn’t. I was wrong. He lost his while skateboarding. He asked how I lost mine. I told him the short and sweet (and somewhat heavily edited) version of my story.

But with family around, that version was not gonna fly. Everybody had a little something to add. My youngest brother started it. My oldest brother was quick to join him. My sister had a thing or two to say, and my sister-in-laws joined in with her. If my other brother and his wife had been there, I’m sure they would have added their two cents as well.

But when Mom weighed in, it morphed into a ‘roast’ of yours truly. They all easily wandered from my teeth to other events of my younger days, much to my nephew’s (and everybody else’s) amusement.

To be truthful, they had a lot of material to work with. In fact, it lasted through the whole meal – dessert and coffee included. So, rather than fight the inevitable, I decided to lean into it and put it all together here in one place.

My wam

When I was young, and even as I got older, I was the one child among five who always seemed to need some kind of medical attention. I don’t remember all the incidents, as I was very young for some of them. But the list of my medical interventions before my memory began have been relayed to me more than once. The rest I remember myself.

These included such incidents as repeated hospital visits for pain in my ‘wam,’ which is what I called my arm at the time. Apparently, I would wake my parents in the middle of the night crying and complaining about pain in my arm. But several late night visits to our local children’s hospital, the Janeway, repeatedly turned up nothing of note.

The medical professionals guessed that my arm was probably pinned under me as I slept. And when I woke it was still profoundly asleep. I interpreted that as pain because I didn’t know any better. This was of no comfort to whichever parent had to ferry me there, wait, get me checked out, and then get us back to Rabbittown.

The incidents with my arm were followed by many a minor injury, and then some more serious ones. For instance, my tonsils got uppity and needed to be removed while my siblings got to keep theirs. And somewhere along the way, I broke my kneecap and would later require several surgeries to keep it in working condition.

But it didn’t start there. Or anywhere really – it’s just been a life-long condition of being my own worst enemy in some ways.

My teeth

I regularly split my lip open as a child, as I was late to the game of learning to use my hands instead of my face to break a fall. Mom recalled many times when Dad would have to remove my bottom lip from my teeth after a fall. My thumb-sucking habit was out of control to the extent that my teeth were more horizontal than vertical.

And I have a big mouth. Not bragging here, just stating the unfortunate truth. I drove my little rake into the roof of my mouth as a child and I still have the scar to prove it. It happened because my buck-toothed maw could actually fit part of an ill-placed child’s rake into it.

At one point, in my dedication to perfecting the faceplant before the words were even in vogue, I was using my super-slider-snow-skates to try to get back up an icy hill so I could go down it again. I fell halfway up the hill, as I was quite proficient with both falling down and falling up.

My teeth hit first. They extended a sufficient distance to act as a momentary pickaxe of some kind when I hit the ice. This kept me from sliding down further until my head bounced back from the impact and went down again.

And there, in a puff of ice chips, went the lower half of one of my front teeth. There was some blood too, as the tooth went into my bottom lip on the second bounce.

It was enough to require an emergency visit to the dentist. I was given a course of antibiotics against infection and another visit in a week.

After a few more dentists’ visits, they pulled the remains of the front tooth. They said it would all grow together and be fine when I got older. This was little comfort to my near-tweenish self.

Over the remaining winter, I remember little else besides my pink penicillin-laced oatmeal and the swelling of my mouth, tongue and lip slowly subsiding.

And with it emerged my new look, which quite closely resembled someone named Alfred E. Newman. I was not amused when I finally got a look at the fictional character (who I would later become a fan of). But I did eventually learn to use my hands to break a fall rather than my face, so I had that going for me!

Anyway, I continued to bumble and clumsy my way through childhood without dying – which is more credit to my parents and my brothers than to my own sense of self preservation.

At one point along the way, somewhere around my tenth year on this planet, something happened that changed me. Biologically it was puberty starting, but I didn’t know that at the time. And it changed the way I looked at my brothers.

When I was very young and growing up with my three brothers (before my little sister came along), I wanted nothing more than to be one of them – one of the boys.

And, for a while, I was. Even though I had Barbies, Chrissy and girly stuff and they had GI Joes and dinkies and trucks, my smartly-dressed dolls would often find themselves mixed up in some backyard adventure, complete with roads and paths, hills and valleys made of dirt, a sketchy plot, and invented villains always in hot pursuit.

Even though I loved being one of the crew, the pack, the team, the group – a part of the formidable four (and then the fantastic five) there came a point where my feminine side overtook my desire to be one with my brothers.

For a short time, I secretly fancied myself to be a princess – just like my dolls.

In real life, other things changed. I stopped buying comics and started buying magazines like Tigerbeat and Seventeen. And I stopped wanting to hang out with my brothers or play their silly games. I remember growing increasingly irritated at their behaviour. I failed to find humour in their frequent farts, like I once did. My snorts and giggles were being slowly replaced by sighs and rolling eyes.

And the more I looked at my new reading material, the more I realized that I wanted to look like those girls in the magazines. I wanted to have long flowing hair, sparkling earrings, and a beautiful smile

I’d already messed up the smile part, but I still held hope that they would grow together and look like other people’s teeth.

I anxiously waited, wanted, wished and willed for that. After searching everyday for signs of movement, of the teeth coming together, I kind of gave up looking. I hadn’t lost my vanity or desire to look like a princess, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

And it wasn’t just the look.

It was the function. Eating was difficult and I generally wore more food than I consumed because I could only chomp through the sides but not the centre of any given item. It was okay when it was just a sandwich but it could be downright dangerous sometimes if it was something hot. Certainly it was hard to look dignified and all princess-like with the guts of a hamburger flopping on my chin and burning me with a crescent-shaped red mark.

Things were not going swimmingly for my young self. It didn’t get better.

My hair

The winter passed and the summer came and it was spent at Bowring Park and weekend camping until Dad got his holidays. At this point, my teeth hadn’t moved more than the width of a fingernail or so. As near as I could tell.

When Dad got his holidays, we left the island and the country and headed down the eastern seaboard for a month of camping and exploring and visiting his sister.

Somewhere along the way, maybe in Maine or Massachusetts, it was noticed that I had developed a large bald spot in the middle of my head, along with a few round red spots on my arm and torso.

Mom and Dad took me to see a pharmacist in some small town and he diagnosed me with ringworm. He gave my parents a cream that would clear it up. The bald spot was a nice big round circle at this point, about an inch and a half or so in diameter.

While the cream mostly cleared up the rings on my body, the one on my head proved to be a bit more stubborn. By the time we returned from our camping holidays, I was no longer losing hair. The ring had stopped growing and was beginning to heal, but still hadn’t grown any new hair.

I would touch it every day, feeling for signs of growth. But the spot remained aggressively bald.

By the time Labour Day came and my room smelled of new shoes, and new school clothes and supplies, I had perfected, as best I could, a comb-over. My hair had been parted in the middle for most of my young life. It was different trying to wear a left side part to cover the middle bald spot.

And so I entered grade 6 – missing a noticeable tooth front and centre, and showing a large bald spot whenever the wind blew or I tilted my head to the left. Of course the spot was spotted and its presence added to the arsenal of taunts that school children throw at each other.

I was rocking the wavy-hair-curly-teeth look and was none too pleased about it.

But, sadly, it didn’t stop there. I still had yet another abuse to heap upon myself.

My ear

When I was young, I desperately wanted to get my ears pierced. Today, piercings and tattoos are a normal part of the human canvas. But when I was growing up, pierced ears was it. There was no thought about piercing any other body part. We didn’t have the idea or language of barrels and gauges back then.

It was simple to me, many girls got their ears pierced as soon as they were teenagers (or before if we could manage it). And some boys got a tattoo somewhere along the way (usually while drinking and under immense peer pressure). Thus proceeded the rites of passage to my very limited, recently double-digit worldview. I was told time and again that I couldn’t get my ears pierced until I was twelve and in grade 7.

I was eleven and in grade 6 with a newly missing front tooth, a noticeable bald spot, and a deep desire to be cool and accepted. My childhood friend was in the same predicament when it came to getting her ears pierced. (Although she didn’t have the missing tooth or bald spot to deal with.)

Our parents were friends and they adhered to the same dictum on our ear-piercing desire. But, early in the school year, we found our reservoir of rebellion and she and I devised a plan to get our way anyway.

A couple of months or so later, we put that plan into action. It was a Friday with no school.

Instead of taking the bus to the mall to hang out for the day like we told our parents, she and I took the bus downtown. We walked around until we found a place where they would pierce our ears. The hand-lettered sign in the window stated ‘Ears pierced – $5.00 with Sleepers – $10.00.’ We went in.

It was a dark, dusky and dusty place, full of clocks, some working, some not. The sound was just ticking and ticking and ticking, it was all you could hear. It was pervasive and eerie, and every once in a while something would chime or coo or clank in a different way, marking time independently, clicking and whirring and moving along until its winding ran its course.

He asked if we had our parents’ permission to get our ears pierced. We quickly lied their consent, an easy thing to do back in our day. We bobbed our heads affirmatively to match our words while we emptied our pockets of our squirreled allowances.

He took our money and put it in the register and then led us into the back part of the store where customers were generally not allowed. He directed us to sit in the two chairs that occupied the back room while he readied what he needed for the job.

When he turned around, all I could see was a large man with a big needle in his hand. I felt relief as he went towards my friend first and I could no longer see what he was doing through the broadness of his back.

But I remember the sound as she jerked in the chair and made a low yelp. I remember looking at her shocked face as she moved to touch her ear. I remember the room taking on a fuzzy, sickly tone – all I could see was dull and soft – as he turned towards me.

He was coming at me with a needle now. There were no numbing ice-cubes we had heard about, no bar of soap, no cleansing rub with some kind of medicinally-wet cotton ball that I could see. And certainly there was no slick ear-piercing apparatus. Just a large man we had paid to stick a needle and a hoop of gold through our earlobes.

I remember regretting my decision to ignore my parent’s command the moment the needle went into my first earlobe.

It hurt.

It hurt in a way that falling on my face didn’t hurt. It hurt in a way that losing my hair and tooth didn’t hurt.

I think it hurt more because, unlike other incidents, I choose to do this to myself. I had, in fact, paid for the privilege and planned for it.

But the pain was momentary, fleeting, and my desire to be cooler than I was had become a marathon in failure that I seemed helpless to stop. I gripped the seat of the chair and just hoped it would be finished soon.

And it was.

We left there, our ears pierced and threaded with tiny gold hoops, red, swelling and oozing. They didn’t look pretty. I think he told us to clean them every day. But at that point we were out the door, anxious to be on our way with our secret mission accomplished.

As much as we wanted to show off our new adornments to our peers, we were equally worried about how we would hide them from our parents.

Long hair helped to cover my new earrings for about a day or so. And when my mother saw them, I spilled my guts on what we had done. I don’t remember if there was punishment, but I do remember the lectures. It didn’t really hit home to me – I was young and it was done and I had won, that was all that mattered. I was finally starting to feel like a princess with gold in my ears.

Until the next day.

I awoke to one of my earlobes swollen and pulsing in a painful way I was not familiar with. It was about the size of a robin’s egg. It was an angry, unhealthy red. The sleeper could hardly be seen anymore. It was another trip to the Janeway.

I remember this one, being held down while the doctor drained some of the gunk so he could remove the gold sleeper and get to the heart of the infection.

They worked on my ear for a little while, but I couldn’t see what they were doing. I did feel the point of release of the pressure and the feeling that the worst of the pain was draining away like the pus. When we were done, the doctor told my father to make sure the earlobe was cleaned with rubbing alcohol twice a day and to come back in a week or so to see how it was and get the catgut removed.

I couldn’t see my ear and I couldn’t touch it, so I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about. When I got home, I raced to our bathroom, desperate for the mirror to see what my ear looked like. I pried up the tape and pulled the gauze gently aside.

It was awful; it looked like an overripe cherry with a dried-up stem. I almost couldn’t see it or be sure because of the size and colour of my earlobe. I taped it up again. The tape stayed on but by Monday morning it was just a ball of hair and sticky adhesive goo.

Mom peeled it off and I went to school with one perfectly pierced ear with a delicate gold sleeper, and one nasty-looking swollen earlobe with a loop of black catgut. I hoped nobody would notice with my long hair covering it.

But the taunts thrown at me the next day at school let me know that I looked more like a pirate than a princess. And that I was a little too late for Halloween, but that I should wish for one new front tooth for Christmas, and so on.

Although the swelling in my earlobe subsided fairly quickly, the newly-coined catcalls remained for awhile, as did the bald spot on my head and the gap in the front of my mouth.

Deep inside, I began to question my actions and plans for my future princessness. I mean, I had already lost a tooth and I hadn’t even gotten my full set yet. Given my clumsy nature, losing an eye or something worse was probably not far into my future if I remained on this path.

Determined, doomed or destined?

One day the next week, I was waiting for the bus at the stop by the Basilica Church – the one close to Garrison Hill with the church parking lot behind it. I went to Our Lady of Mercy (where my mother was a teacher) and my brothers were in St. Pat’s.

After school, we would walk home, wait for mom by the car in the parking lot to get a ride, or we would take the bus. We didn’t usually take the bus together, as we were at different schools. But sometimes we would be waiting at the bus stop separately with our classmates.

It was late fall and we had a first snowfall of the year – wet heavy stuff. I had waited with my friends, but their bus had come first. So then I waited alone.

There were three boys there who were teasing and taunting me. Being loud and jostling each other and making buck-toothed faces at me and laughing loudly at their jokes and insults. I hung my head, trying to hide behind the curtain of my remaining hair with my mouth firmly shut, my hand fidgeting with my recently traumatized earlobe.

I tried to move away, but they moved closer. Two of them bumped me hard, with their front teeth over their bottom lip, making fun of my gap and overbite and asking me “Whaff happened to you toof?”

I stumbled backwards and hit the stone retaining wall, crouching a little; unsure of what was going to happen.

I peeked between the strands of my hair, trying to gauge the next move after their opening salvo. Two of them were advancing again and one hung behind, not as into the bullying as his peers it seemed.

As I looked up at their faces, terrified of what might be coming, a snowball slammed hard into the left side of the head of the boy who was closest to me. He leaned to the right with the unexpected impact, plowing into his friend and taking them both down like bowling pins.

I was stunned. I was saved. And I could hear the bus coming up the curve – escape was near.

I straightened up from my crouch and looked around to see where that missile had come from.

There, in the top part of the parking lot with two of his friends from school, was my brother.

He was in a straight-backed stance with a satisfied look on his face, snow dripping off his bare hands. He gave me a smirk and a nod and I gave him a grateful look.

I got in line and got on the bus. But by the time I took a seat, he was turned back to his friends – all of them laughing and no doubt praising him for such a perfect shot. I noticed the other boys walking away from the scene, one of them with his hand on his head.

I sat on the bus and replayed the moments before over and over in my head. I didn’t get off at my stop; I stayed in my seat and did the route twice before ringing the bell.

This moment would come back to me time and again in the next few weeks and months – the terrified feeling, the menacing advancing boys, the precise missile, the arcs of the exploding bits of snowball, the feeling of escape, and, most importantly – the feeling of belonging.

I wasn’t saved because I was a princess. Nobody treated a princess like those boys were treating me.

And, truth to be told, I didn’t feel like a princess. Not on that day, or on any other day really. But I did feel like a pirate for most of my life (at least my romanticized idea of a pirate) and especially later that day, with black catgut in my ear and the vivid vision of a bully getting a righteous comeuppance from one of my crew.

My mate had my back. My brother covered me. And he didn’t do it because of the way I looked. He did it because of who I was – I was one of his crew and he was watching out for me. Even if I didn’t know it at that moment.

It made me feel good. It made me feel protected. It made me feel like I belonged. I liked the feeling of being ‘part of’ something more than the feeling (and effort!) of being a princess on a pedestal ‘apart from’ everyone.

I came to realize that I wanted someone to have my back no matter what my front looked like.

Although I didn’t figure it out for a while, that moment helped to cure me of my princess fantasy and put me firmly in the pirate crew.

Which is exactly where I belong.

 

© CRodgers December 2023