Tuesday Reminiscences: In which I remember being gappy but happy

It appears as if Nora is blessed with a diastema, or a gap between her front teeth. Of course, we can't be sure until all her teeth come in and get all settled, but for now, she's got a great one.

My dad has a diastema, and although my sister Anne told me the other day that she used to have one before she had braces, I have zero memory of this. Less than zero. And I don't really believer her because...


I was always a little irritated that out of 7 children, I was the only one who inherited it. Here's a picture of me on Halloween my sophomore year of high school, right before I got braces. I was teased mercilessly by my older brother about my diastema when I was very young, such that I didn't show my teeth in pictures for about 15 years. My friend Carlin (who is on the top of the picture) thought it was the coolest and wanted me to show off how I could fit my tongue through the gap.

Warning: gross picture to follow.


In order to fix the gap, I had to have a frenectomy. Your frenulum is the little piece of tissue that holds your lips onto your gums; you can feel it when you run your tongue up between your lip and your teeth. When my braces pushed my two front teeth together, my gum tissue got all bunched up and when they took my braces off, it would have just sprung back, so I had to have it taken out. I'm 100% positive that Anne did not have this procedure done, which furthers my theory that she did not have a gap.

When I pointed out to Tyler that Nora has a gap, he was a little irritated. I thought he was miffed that she has a physical "blemish" and that she might get teased about it. I assured him that it builds character and that she'd be a stronger person for it.

"No, that's not it. It's just that now we have to pay for her to have oral surgery to fix it."