Hometown: Bad Teeth 1

Linda Stansberry provides a column for Redheaded Blackbelt once per month. If you don’t know this homegrown writer’s work, we’re betting you’ll soon come to look forward to every column. And if you do know, you’ve probably already skipped this intro to get to the good stuff, her writing:

I believe in fluoride. I believe in it because I grew up fifty miles away from the nearest freeway drinking cold, clear springwater and getting high on the cheapest drugs at hand: Off brand soda and Little Debbie snack cakes. There were four of us – my mom, my dad, my brother and I – and our teeth gained holes like a Humboldt County back road in the spring.

It took two hours to get to the dentist in Garberville. Two hours, down a four-mile gravel driveway, then the narrow, pothole-filled county road. Sometimes in the middle of the driving rain. Imagine driving four hours round trip through a winter storm to take your unappreciative children to be tortured by a man with a drill and then paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Again, fluoride.

In the way of most middle-class children, I assumed my dad was rich. He wasn’t. We canned fruits and vegetables all summer to eat in the winter. And without any kind of insurance to buffer the cost, he took us to the dentist and paid out the nose to make sure our cavities were filled and our overbites corrected. He did it for the same reason my mother yelled at me when I went barefoot by choice – because they knew what real poverty looked like, and they wanted to give their kids the best chance they could to be healthy and fit in. Now that I’m an adult and I have to pay for my own dental work, I feel like apologizing to my parents all the time for everything I took for granted.

My first dentist was nice – a Vietnam veteran who also umpired for the local softball league. On the rare occasions I made it to third base at away games he would ask me about my fillings. My teeth at twelve were a patched road of fillings. And then came the orthodontist.

I am going to say something controversial again. I think most orthodontic work is a scam. It’s a scam the way that Brazilian waxes are a scam. It’s the infliction of pain for a pointless aesthetic norm. There was nothing wrong with my little overbite and my slightly raised canine teeth, which gave me the appearance of a chubby little fruit bat. But the orthodontist told my mother that my mouth would grow crowded and my bite would be off when I got older, and so began the monthly torture. For those of you that have never worn braces, imagine this: Someone glues a tiny metal square to each of your teeth. Then they wrap a piece of wire around all those those little metal squares and winch it tight, tight, tight, until tears run down your chubby cheeks. Your tongue tries to explore this violation and the orthodontist instructs his hygienist to restrain it with a wooden stick. The only measure of autonomy you have is the color of the rubber bands they wrap your braces with. You try to pick colors that the other kids at school might think are cool. They are never cool.

Our orthodontist was in Fortuna, two hours in the opposite direction of the dentist. Fortuna was a big town compared to where we grew up. It had – check this out – a Burger King and a McDonalds.I tried to make friends with the sophisticated middle-class kids in the lobby, but they looked at me like I was weird. My little brother blushed with shame when the pretty receptionist made him go back outside and wipe the cow shit off of his shoes.

It’s hard to do things in the cold. We had only wood heat when I was growing up and the nights were so cold in the winter it would wake me up at night. Lots of mornings I would take my clothes back to bed and get dressed under the covers. Standing in our icebox of a bathroom and going through the patient motions of threading floss beneath the wires of my braces every night to remove all of the trapped food felt impossible and pointless. I still remember the disappointed tick of my orthodontist’s inhale the day my braces came off.

“You didn’t clean your teeth, did you?” he asked. My now perfectly-straight teeth were flecked with orange and yellow stains. I had pictured the day my braces came off differently, the first stage of my transition from ugly adolescent duckling to lithe teenage swan. Instead, I taught myself to smile with my mouth closed, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Bad Teeth I is the first installment of a three-part series I’m writing to help bring attention to the need for more comprehensive oral health care in Humboldt County. February is National Children’s Dental Care Month.

Eureka Mayor Susan Seaman, the California Center for Rural Policy at Cal Poly Humboldt and the Dental Advisory Group are looking for your stories about dental challenges in our community. They’ll be hosting a meeting to talk about how to support efforts to increase access to oral health services for all of us who live in Humboldt County. Please visit  HumOralHealth.bit.ly for more information.

Linda Stansberry (she/her) is a writer and journalist who lives in Eureka. Hometown is her monthly syndicated column. You can find more of her work at www.lindastansberry.com.

NOTE: After reflection the author requested we update “I think orthodontic work is a scam” to “I think most orthodontic work is a scam.”