Keeping It Real - Part One

I have a feeling that this part of my blog will happen often within this next year.  I'm going to call it "Keeping It Real", because that's what a lot of the experiences in JVC are forcing me to do.  Keeping it real can always be called 'Things I Take For Granted', or 'Things I Never Knew Were Blessings, Anyway".  The majority of the time, these things are things that I stupidly say before realizing that my residents don't have this privilege, or things I do before recognizing that maybe not everyone has had this background.  So, my theme for this week's episode is this:

Teeth.

I had terrible teeth when I was growing up.  When I was a kid, a dentist once asked me, quite bewildered, "How do you CHEW?"  Not one of my teeth lined up.  Some kind folks dubbed me shark-teeth, and reminded me of it daily.  My poor mother wondered how she got such a mutant child.  Needless to say, I had many years of teeth-straightening and braces ahead of me.  I remember well those tear-filled nights where all I wanted to do was rip my teeth out of my head, thank you very much, because having those suckers moved around by rubber-bands and metal wires hurt. (And I have a feeling my mother remembers them, and my many many tears and angry yells, too.)  But when I was in 7th-grade, and I finally looked in the mirror for the first time with my shiny, bright, white, even teeth, I was ecstatic.  I couldn't stop looking at myself.  I finally had what I had always wanted - perfect teeth.  (I still had the round Harry Potter glasses, bushy curly hair and overalls, but, hey, small miracles here.  But back to seriousness.)

Somewhere along the way, I lost that.  That recognition that these teeth are a blessing, something that not everybody has, and that I didn't have for the early years of my life.  I've always been complimented on my smile since then, and it is one of my prides.  I love that I have the teeth that I do, and I love that it seems to make others smile when I do.  My teeth aren't perfect anymore - I forgot to wear my retainer far too many nights for that - and sometimes when I look at my teeth now, I see the crookedness and unevenness there instead of the beauty.

But today, I realized that my residents look at my smile and see what they wish they could have.  Teeth are something that so many of us take for granted.  Many of my residents are missing many of their teeth, and they smile with closed mouths, if they smile at all.  They cannot chew their food properly, and they have problems drinking hot or cold water since it irritates their gums.  Those teeth that they do have they don't care for, since they see it as a wasted battle anyway.  One resident yesterday proudly told me to look at "the old him" for the last time, since it was the day he was going to get his dentures.  To be honest, I didn't notice that much of a difference when he returned, teeth in mouth, but to him, those two front teeth make him respectable, make him personable, make him able to get a job and move on with his life.  A lack of teeth is just one more hurdle that the residents of the Wintonia are facing, and one more thing that "everyone else" has that they don't.  And what a basic, basic need.  Teeth.

I find myself conscious of it, the way that you are conscious of wearing an expensive necklace or designer clothes.  As if I am flaunting my privilege all over the place, and showing off, or something.  There's nothing I can do about this feeling, of course, but it just keeps things in perspective for me.  And while telling me that there are starving children in Africa won't make me less hungry, perhaps this will gently remind me to keep perspective, and keep rolling on.

Keep it real.

-K