Mind The Gap – A Tale of British Teeth and Personal Growth
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I have always hated my teeth. Perhaps ‘always’ is a bit of an overstatement, for I had no idea anything was wrong with my smile for the first ten years of my life. But after sending seven years living in the Caribbean island of Jamaica, I returned to London aged ten to discover almost immediately that kids can be bloody mean.
It’s not that we pickneys were not mean in Jamaica. However, we were probably more used to people with toothy smiles and a gap between their two front teeth and found other reasons to ridicule them. So “your teeth are like stars, yellow and far apart” and other such comments did not cross my consciousness before returning home to London.
Not that my new school chums had anything much to smile about themselves. The teeth of the nation in England were pretty poor by any standards, even back in 1973. Little poverty-stricken Jamaica still had much better notchers than your average, more well-to-do Brit. None of my former schoolmates in Kingston would have ever envied ‘the London look’. Yet that didn’t stop me from getting ribbed mercilessly for my so-called ‘buck-teeth’ smile in the playgrounds of British schools.
I repeat, children can be cruel. They will tease you endlessly when they find your most apparent flaw. And the more you react, the more they will turn the screw. I learned to turn their teasing into a virtue in the playground by being the joker among us. That guy who made everyone laugh was protection enough for a while, but in my heart, I internalised the pain of being Bugs Bunny, “what’s up, Doc?”
It was all in friendly jest, of course, but it affected my self-esteem even if I was good at pretending otherwise, as if I did not care. Making other people laugh was always a good way to deflect the wrong attention. Yet even to this day, you’ll rarely see any picture of me where I’m smiling.
Point a camera in my direction; my first instinct is to close my mouth. This habit I share with Queen’s frontman, Freddy Mercury, makes me appear rather pensive in photographs, even where I might have been bursting to laugh when the shot was snapped.
Being quick to smile back then, I may have seemed okay with my overhanging smile and, Diastema, a noticeable gap between my two protruding upper front teeth. But inside, I longed for ‘normal’ teeth. I’ll never know why my mother hadn’t decided to get me braces along with the elocution lessons, extra reading classes, and modern dance. But my teeth are somewhat of a family trait on my father’s side, so perhaps she felt buck teeth gave me character.
People of her generation were used to having all their teeth forcibly removed in Jamaica for simply having Pyria, which today can be treated through professional dental care, medications, laser therapy, surgery, and ongoing oral hygiene maintenance – quite a commitment on an average British salary. So mum placed her pearly whites in a jar by the side of her bed at night when I was a boy, having removed all her teeth by age twenty-one. Obviously, I didn’t fancy that fate.
Fast forward a few decades: “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I started. I really must apologise. I’ve got three more months of wearing my Invisalign braces left, which, as you can probably hear, makes me talk as if I’ve got a mouth full of pebbles. But, I’m told that at the end of this painful process, I will have a new American smile, like the forty-sixth president of the United States, the Donald. Now, isn’t that just priceless?” They all laughed.
We Brits are known worldwide for our bad teeth, whether true or not. And after fifty-odd years of living with my buck-tooth, big gap, yellow-stained smile, I had finally decided to do something about it. A lover once riled at the end of an affair, “You really should get your teeth fixed. It would make you a much nicer person.”
Finally, I bit the bullet and decided to change the habit of a lifetime. Of course, some might say that the money had been burning a hole in my pocket because it cost a bleeding fortune to try and shift my grinders a few millimetres. Plus, after all that effort, I wasn’t even sure I liked the results.
For obvious reasons, I hadn’t taken up that bitchy form of encouragement years ago. However, on returning from six years of working abroad among some of the poorest people with the straightest, whitest teeth you can imagine, it suddenly occurred to me that I was, in fact, far too vain not to spend a small, if considerable fortune sorting out my noshers once and for all.
It may have been something to do with those annoying ads that followed me online. I swear to God; Google knows your thoughts. Anyway, upon doing the rounds at various orthodontic clinics advertised in some of the more popular daily rags, I settled on UltraSmile to fix the unfixable.
Not only was their price right, but their payment plan suited to my pockets, while their walls were covered with pictures of countless celebrities I had always assumed were born naturally beautiful with perfect choppers. Not so, it seemed.
But in the end, what clinched it for me was that my lovely niece recommended them. She had had the misfortune to inherit teeth from my side of the gene pool. However, after years of wearing ‘Ugly Betty’ metal braces as a child, she now has the most stunning set of ivory towers, finished by a year of the latest Invisalign treatment from the good people at you know where.
Now, if you were to see my niece, she has an all-year perma-smile and looks exactly like a lost member of the Kardashian Klan. Wow! So if it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me, or so I thought.
As my dental transformation progressed, I spent countless hours in the dentist’s chair. Every appointment led to a noticeable change: straighter, whiter teeth, a reduced overhang, and a gradual reshaping of my grin. But through it all, one thing remained: my signature gap.
During one of my visits to East London, the dentist, a tall Asian chap with an infectious laugh, brought up the subject of my gap. “You know, we can work on that gap of yours”, he said. We have the technology to weld those front teeth together at the back. It’ll give you that perfect Hollywood smile.”
I looked at him, then at my reflection in the hand-held mirror. The straighter, whiter teeth were a welcome change, but the gap was me. It was a symbol of my past, my journey, and my unique character. It was my Bugs Bunny lineage, my uniquely British charm. And suddenly, I knew that I didn’t want a perfect Hollywood smile after all. I wanted my smile — my gap and all.
I shook my head, much to the dentist’s surprise. “No,” I said. “I think I’ll keep the gap.”
“But… why?” he asked, clearly taken aback. He probably wasn’t used to patients turning down the chance for ‘perfection’.
I shrugged, a slow smile spreading across my face. “Because it’s not just a gap. It’s a part of me, my heritage. A part of my story. And I’ve grown rather fond of it.”
The dentist looked at me momentarily, then burst into a broad smile. “Well, that’s a first,” he said, shaking his head. “But I have to say. I admire your decision. It’s not everyone we meet who embraces their uniqueness so readily.”
From that day forward, I saw my gap-toothed grin in a new light. A gap tooth is a sign of beauty among the Ghanaians I had lived with for nearly six years. It wasn’t a flaw to be corrected but a trait to be celebrated. So I started to show off my smile more, not despite the gap but because of it. I learned to embrace my unique charm, the Bugs Bunny lineage, and a journey that led me to this newfound self-acceptance. “What’s up, Doc?”
And the best part? Reactions I received from family and friends who were pleasantly surprised. Even my niece looked at me with newfound admiration. “Uncle,” she said, “your smile is so cool! I’m glad you kept your gap.”
I laughed and ruffled her hair. “Thanks, kiddo,” I said, my heart swelling with pride. “Through it all, I’ve leant one thing: it’s not about having a perfect smile. It’s about having a smile that’s perfectly you.”
I had spent a small fortune to ‘fix’ my teeth. But in the end, I had not just fixed my smile. I discovered a deeper understanding of myself. My perception of beauty and my relationship with my reflection changed. I had learned to embrace my gap-toothed grin, my uniquely British charm, and the unexpected decision that led me to celebrate my kind of beauty.
So, here’s to anyone out there struggling with their own ‘gap’ tooth smile. Remember, it’s the imperfections that make us perfectly unique. Cheers to that!
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