Writer's Workshop: My Smile

I found this Writer's Workshop from Mama's Losin' It and I do believe I am going to join in. I'm about a week behind, but that's okay.

The Prompts:

1.) Describe a moment when you realized you and your spouse were SO different.

2.) What is your role in the household?

3.) Write about how you felt when you discovered you were lied to.
(creativewritingprompts.com)

4.) Describe a hard time you gave a teacher...what would you say to them today?

5.) What is an unpleasant experience you had eating? Write a poem, paragraph, or something else about the experience.
(writingfix.com)

My choice: #5

When I was born I had enlarged adenoids and I could not breathe through my nose, so I had to breathe through my mouth. When you're a baby, your tongue presses against the roof of your mouth which widens your mouth as you grow. Since I had to breathe through my mouth, my tongue did not do this and my mouth never widened. I did have my adenoids removed when I was about three years old, but it was already too late and as I got older is became really apparent I had an open bite.

Many people confuse an open bite with an over bite, so here is the difference:

Over bite:


Open bite:


Eating with an open bite is...well, it sucks. When you bite into a sandwich, all the insides get pulled out because you can't bite the whole way through the sandwich. You can't bite apart things like noodles and crackers because your front teeth don't come together enough. You have use your back teeth to take a bite of things like cookies and spaghetti. Also, and I think this was the worst, my lips don't naturally close because of the open bite. Have you even noticed how a baby's mouth doesn't really close? Their tops lips are like an upside down "U" and their little mouths are always formed into little "Os"? Well, that's what my lips are like. The top and bottom lip don't come together. Growing up with the open bite made it really hard to chew with my mouth shut. My mom was always telling me, "Chew with your mouth shut." And it was hard because I really had to concentrate because it didn't stay closed naturally.

The thing is, growing up I didn't really know anything different, so even though these things were annoying, I didn't how annoying they really were.

When I was 16, I was given the opportunity to have corrective surgery. Basically, they cut a rectangle of my jaw bone out right above my front teeth and then they pushed my front teeth up and back. I look like a black and blue swollen chipmunk for weeks. Luckily, I didn't have to have my jaw wired shut. However, I couldn't eat anything, but mush for weeks. My mom blended everything into a milkshake for me. My doctor tried to tell me that I should just blend up a cheeseburger and slurp away. Um, no. I stuck mainly to soups. Anyway, this was a pretty sucky eating situation as well.

I remember, that summer my mom was really into going to auctions and I went with her one day. I was still pretty swollen, but I had locked myself up in the house for weeks and I needed a bit of the world again. They had chicken noodle soup for sale and I got a Styrofoam bowl of it. The noodles were the thick flat noodles that are always overcooked at restaurants and places that make soup in bulk. I put a noodle on the plastic spoon and for the first time in my life, I bit half of the noodle off with my front teeth.

I started crying because I could bite through a noodle using my front teeth. It sounds so silly, but when for 16 years I had not been able to use my front teeth as nature intended, it was amazing to me to finally be able to.


Cheeee-ah-eeeese!