teeth.

i have been told that when i say certain words, my tongue just barely presses against the back of my front teeth. yes, someone was at one time enamored with me enough to notice this... some might call this love; my dentist would call this a "tongue thrust." yes, that is a real term from the world of dentistry. if you don't believe me, check it out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_thrust.
anyway, it was worse when i was little. so bad, in fact, that it caused me to have buck teeth. my teeth never got too gnarly though, as they were able to be corrected with a retainer and i never needed braces. (sidenote: when i was a kid and all my friends had braces, i really wanted them. i thought they looked awesome. i thought i would really be able to pull them off in a stylish-like manner. not to mention, you could have different color rubberbands that you could alternate in and out to coordinate with your outfits. this was before retainers could be made to look like watermelons and ladybugs. even then, though, you don't see that because its pressed up against the roof of your mouth. there is nothing about that that is stylish AND accessorizable- not the way rubberbands were. imagine matching your brace rubberbands to the different levels of scrunchie socks you were wearing. genious.) anyhoo, my tongue issue needed to be corrected with a retainer that had these little prong things that stuck out of the roof from the bottom of the retainer, basically a gate to keep my tongue away from my teeth. kind of like a love story... guy from the wrong side of the tracks can't pursue his true love because of the overinvolved dad of the rich girl... like romeo and juliet, or pretty in pink... on more than one occasion, those prongs actually punctured my tongue. honestly, i really tried to find a picture of one of these things so you could see this contraption but to no avail. eventually, i threw the thing away. on accident. i did this three times, actually. i would tuck it in my lunch bag so my friends didnt have to look at this gross retainer/torture device while we were eating our pb&j's and chips and whatnot. then i would forgot all about it, throw my lunchbag into the dumpster on the way out to the playground and about four minutes later come running back in to the lunch area, frantic, and ask the lunch-yard-duty-lady to please help me find it. (my orthodontist told me that if i lost it, i would have to go there on the weekends and sweep the parking lot to pay for a new one. i believed him.) keep in mind, my mom never got me fancy lunch bags. just the standard, yet classic, brown paper variety, and i would expect this woman to dig through an entire elementary school's worth of brown lunch bags and half-eaten lunch remains to find my retainer. and bless her soul, she did. twice. the third time i don't think i thought about my retainer until i got home from school, which of course was too late. i still had the case for it though- a little green turtle. i don't know why i remember this. i don't even know what made me think about my teeth or retainer in the first place. i never did have to go back and sweep the parking lot. i also never needed another retainer. i guess it had done its job and there was no need to stay. i'm also glad that i never needed braces, because i get to be that ONE person in a group of my peers who gets to say "i never had braces" when everyone else has. this conversation, for whatever reason, will always come up eventually within any given group of friends/coworkers/whatever... and i get to be the "lucky" one. so there.