I recently discovered I'm having TMJ problems and, a few weekends ago, experienced my jaw locking shut for the first time. It was excruciating. My mouth wouldn't open enough to allow the smallest bite off a fork into my mouth. In tears, I used my finger to push a tiny, smashed bite of a peach into the corner of my mouth, and mashed it up with my tongue, since my chewing mechanism was broken. Trying to talk was a huge ordeal, so I kept my mouth closed and slipped my words out like a ventriloquist---a ventriloquist without a dummy.
What I saw in the mirror wasn't any more comforting. The right side of my face had swelled up and, from my temple to jaw, my cheekbone jutted sharply out, a drastic contrast from the smoothness of the left side of my face. Would I have one protruding cheekbone forever? Completely bummed out, I wished for my usual face back. My normal, ordinary, what I had often considered boring, face.
A few days later, I lie in the chair at the specialist's office, where he and his assistant spent an hour adjusting a bite splint to sit on top of my lower teeth---a huge, bulky piece of plastic with metal hooks, that would supposedly let my jaws rest from their clenching and allow the dislocated disk to fall back into place.
"Just you watch," I thought dismally, "now is when I will probably meet a guy. After years of being single, I will probably become interested in someone now---when I have this huge piece of plastic sitting in my mouth."
"How will I kiss him?!" I thought. I might fall in love and want to kiss him. Need to kiss him. Want and need to kiss him! How will that work? I can't kiss him with a clunky bite splint in my mouth, and I really doubt there is a hot way of removing it. (You have seen Tina Fey in "Date Night," haven't you?) Perhaps I could take a friend's suggestion to always wear an outfit with pockets, so I could discreetly cough and slip it into a pocket. Then again, without the splint, my mouth may not even work well enough to be physically capable of kissing.
Can't anyone help me figure out the logistics of how to kiss my imaginary boyfriend?!
I thought my awkward phases would all be behind me at 34.5 years of age.
A few days after that, I woke up and felt a small bit of something in my mouth. Frantic, I rushed to the mirror and exclaimed, "My tooth!" holding the miniscule chip, which was mostly just white resin that had unnecessarily covered a tiny chip I was self-conscious of ten years ago. But that wasn't much comfort when I held it in my hand. My mind exaggerated the unnoticeable defect until I felt like the face on a Halloween costume that has the blacked-out teeth. Plus, it chipped into a slight point and kind of looked like a werewolf. A vampire. But aren't vampires pretty popular right now? A vampire with a bite splint....Hot. "I've--come--to--suck--your--blood..." Oh wait, I forget. I can't even do that. My jaw muscles are too sore to slash my fangs into anyone. So I can't be a hot, trendy vampire, after all.
..And I wished for my ordinary face back. Even my recent ordinary face. The average face with the huge, plastic bite splint, but at least no broken teeth.
I'm starting to believe our awkward phases are never all behind us.
And I never did solve my dilemma about kissing with a bite splint. I asked a friend about it, who said, "That would be such a minor detail to the man who gets to be with you."
The man who gets to be with me....I like how that sounds.
And maybe if I meet him with a slightly chipped tooth, that will be a minor detail too.
In the meantime---while I try to figure out how the bite splint will affect my life if I make a sudden decision to audition as the next "Bachelorette"---I'm trying to smile anyway and be accepting of my face with the clumsy splint and defective jaw joints and slight chip,
knowing there could always be a day when we just wish we could have back what we never even realized we had.
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