I was a toothless teenager—here's how it shaped me

A personal essay exploring the connection between teeth, identity, beauty standards, and self-worth, particularly for young women.

I'm around 13, sitting at the piano in the living room of my mom's house, rehearsing A Whole New World from Aladdin when my mom and dad return from an appointment with my soon-to-be orthodontist. The news is bad.

I need to have multiple baby teeth pulled. They’re not falling out on their own, and the two adult teeth on each side of my top front teeth don't exist. Missing teeth is something I inherited from both my granny and my mom, each of whom is missing one top incisor. I’ve also inherited my mom’s coldness and impatience; too bad I didn’t get her long, slender legs.

I’m too old for lost teeth to be cute and conversational—no, the tooth fairy did not leave me a dollar under my pillow—but I’m too young to have them falling out. To avoid a lifetime of toothlessness and shame, like my mom, who often complains about her crooked smile and receding chin, I’ll need surgery for dental implants.

The first stop on my dental tour is the oral surgeon. He's a kind, older man with white hair, frenetic like Albert Einstein’s. I'm sitting in the reclining dentist chair in the middle of the room with a paper apron draped over me. He puts a rubber nozzle over my nose that blows sweet-smelling air, and pretty soon I'm high on nitrous oxide. During this first visit, Albert Einstein Redux extracts all my remaining baby teeth—the two incisors next to my front teeth and the two canines next to them.

My adult canines are lying horizontally in my gums. It's like they decided to stretch out for a nap because of the two missing incisors on either side of my front teeth. These teeth are not coming down on their own. After pulling my baby teeth, the oral surgeon makes two small incisions in my gums, removes the small, benign cysts from around my teeth, and glues two small metal brackets to each canine.

My next stop is the orthodontist. He attaches metal braces to all my teeth, but there are two big gaps on each side of my two front teeth, making them look even bigger. I look like Bugs Bunny, except less enthusiastic. It's embarrassing, but my parents don’t make a big deal about it, and my older brother never makes fun of me. They probably told him not to.

So from now on, I press my lips together when I smile. The most physically painful part is when the orthodontist ties wires to the metal brackets on my canines that have yet to break through my gums and then wraps them around the thicker metal wire that runs across the spaces where my teeth should be. He pulls like you'd tie an ice skate. This is how he will get my two pointy teeth to make an appearance.

He ties ice skates in my mouth for months. It hurts like hell as I squirm in the cold, leather reclining chair. But it works. The tips of my canines eventually break through my gums, but it’s another kind of breakthrough, too. Maybe I won’t feel ashamed to smile soon, I think. Maybe at my next school dance, a boy will ask me to dance, placing his hands on my hips while I nervously rest mine on his shoulders. Maybe my crush will finally notice me.

As a kid, I didn’t think about the shame associated with teeth, about how much of my self-worth was wrapped around something I had no control over. But teeth are more than just teeth, or, at least, they were—and still are—for me.

Eventually, I’m only missing two teeth. My canines claim their spot. Progress, I think. Soon, I can smile again without feeling judged and worrying about what people think—the shame I feel about being toothless will finally disappear. The teeth I have aren't crooked. They're spacious, and my chin recedes slightly. The solution is to wear rubber bands for months to realign my jaw while the braces close the gaps.

But this isn’t the end of it. After four years of monthly visits to the orthodontist, the braces come off, and I have a retainer with two false teeth attached to fill the spaces next to my front teeth. It's like dentures for teenagers, except I’m the only one my age wearing them.

I return to the oral surgeon. This time, while the laughing gas is pumping, he comes into the room wearing an elephant nose mask and says, "People tend to look a bit funny when you're on that stuff." I laugh. My dad also laughs. He's sitting in the corner of the room on a round stool with his hands in his lap. He looks more nervous than I am. I'm lying on the reclining dental chair in the middle of the room. My dad's here to support me while the oral surgeon drills holes in my gums, down to and through the bone. He has to insert metal screws in my jaw, one for each incisor, so porcelain teeth can later be glued on.

I wait months for the screws to fuse to my bones. For months, I wear a retainer that has teeth in it. Food gets stuck between the retainer and the roof of my mouth, but I don't want to take it out while I eat lunch at school. It's annoying, and I wish I didn’t have to deal with it. Why did I get stuck with these embarrassing genetic traits that no one else my age seems to be dealing with? I wonder. Why didn’t I get my mom’s long, slender legs instead? I keep reminding myself that it’s temporary and better than living a toothless life.

Finally, the day comes. I’m 16 now, so I drive myself to the dentist in my grey, boxy 1980s Mercedes. (I didn’t have teeth, but at least I had a cool car.) They glue two porcelain crowns to the screws in my mouth, where my real lateral incisors should have been. I save the retainer for a while, as a reminder of what I’ve been through—a souvenir—but also just in case something happens and I need it again.

I'm no longer toothless. I'm proud of my straight, full set of teeth. I can smile again without pressing my lips together, but it will take time to get used to this. Will people notice that I suddenly have all my teeth and ask questions? I wonder. Will my fake teeth fall out when I bite into an apple? Will boys ask me to slow dance now that I have all my teeth? Am I pretty now? Will I always be known as the girl without teeth?

I've been told implants are stronger than real teeth, they don’t get cavities or turn yellow, and they can stand the test of time, just like I did as a young teenager, pretending everything was OK. I pushed through the shame I felt about the gaps in my mouth while secretly wishing I had a full set of teeth like everyone else my age.

Implants are strong, but they’re not real. That day, I walked confidently out of the dentist’s office. As I drove off, constantly checking my new smile in the rearview mirror, I thought I was leaving behind the trauma, anxiety, and insecurity the experience had caused me. But almost 25 years later, I still wake in the night, haunted by dreams, toothless, not in life, but in my unconscious.

Cute little me.

Thanks for reading!

Alexis

P.S. At first, I felt a bit anxious about using my school portrait for the cover image of this post, so I considered using a picture of Ed Helms after he pulled out his tooth in The Hangover. While searching for that image, I read that he dealt with something similar and removed the crown of his implant for his role in The Hangover. How cool!