I remember my friend Jeana at the bar in Nashville, Tennessee, or actually on her way to the bar saying that her teeth may be crooked, but at least they were all in there. She was referring to the many addicts of different stripes who frequented the bars and heralded their addictions by the amount of teeth not in their heads. I laughed at the time, but now it’s not as funny.
I have a tooth in the front bottom that was broken in half in a car wreck I was in when I was ten. I have had, since that time, a little porcelain cap that sits over the stump and makes it look like I have a tooth there. From the age of ten to the age of thirty-three, that cap would fall off from time to time and I’d have to go to the dentist to cement that sucker back in again. Near my thirty-third birthday, it fell out. I was too poor to have it fixed, so I put it in a tiny Tupperware meant maybe for condiments and held onto it for that one blessed day when I could afford to have it stuck back in.
I lost it.
To this day, I don’t know what happened to it. The container fell off the dresser and, magically, somehow in the fall, the little cap disappeared. It was the same color as the carpet and I am legally blind so there was no chance of me finding it. It was gone forever the moment it hit the floor.
So now, middle-aged, and only recently just barely able to start maybe affording the dentist, I have this little half blank spot in the front of my bottom teeth and I am hideously embarrassed about it. You don’t see it when I smile, thank the gods, but you can see it a little when I talk so it makes me want to move my mouth less, or cover it up, or pull a scarf up over myself, or shut up entirely.
I’m not an addict. I’m just a woman who can’t afford a porcelain cap, and there is a hole in my mouth even though my teeth are otherwise straight. But in that moment with my friend when I laughed at the hole-y mouthed barflies, when I was too young and stupid to know not to laugh at fate by way of mocking other people, I doomed myself to be one of them, and now people may be out there mocking me, thinking my tooth was lost to meth or alcohol or the kind of massive Mountain Dew consumption backwoods Tennessee types are often accused of, whether guilty or not.
Or maybe they do know it’s a financial issue, and that’s worthy of scorn too. My half a lack of tooth announces my money struggles, and that has to be unattractive. What man wants to save a hole-y mouthed poor girl? All the investment he’d have to make right off the bat to get her teeth done and make her presentable to his friends! It’s a burden, no matter how much he may love the other 97% of her smile—and yes, there’s her personality, but you’d have to get past the mouth to get to it.
The mystical poet Rumi talks about a man who is distracted from “the Lover” by a “stinking-mouthed” old crone who has “no milk no flower.” I was all into Rumi until I read that. How can he tell from her mouth that she has no flower? What’s wrong with being an age of a woman who no longer has milk? What’s wrong with a type of a woman who doesn’t want to be milk and flowers in the first place?
Maybe her mouth is a sign of the oppression of poverty, and the lack of milk and flower is a sign of independence. Is that not the very presence of the kind of god to whom he was supposed to have been praying?
Rumi’s stinking-mouthed woman was a lightning strike of superficiality, sexism, and classism that I think most people, enchanted by his lightning strikes of poetic inspiration miss. If I hadn’t been that crone, barely at middle-age, I would likely have missed it too.
About a year ago, my mother got sick. She got very sick. It started with an UTI and, while in a skilled nursing facility receiving a two-week treatment of IV antibiotics, she decided to stop eating. She just stopped. She refused everything for one week, two, three. Nothing I could do would make her eat. I brought her chocolate and gourmet soup. I brought her favorite cookies. I brought her church friends in to coax her. I brought her church priests in to bless her into eating. It didn’t work.
One day, the caregivers at her board and care facility called to tell me her legs were turning purple. I had them send her to the emergency room. Her blood pressure had fallen to sixty over something. She almost died. All of this from willfully, stubbornly not eating. I got her a psych evaluation and they gave her a medicine that increased her appetite whether she liked it or not. She started eating again and, after a few months, was ready to come home.
While she was going through that, and I had to watch my mother willfully and agonizingly slowly try to kill herself, my mouth exploded. That one half a missing tooth was now accompanied three cavities painfully announcing themselves. I remember one day getting off the phone with one of my mother’s caregivers reporting to me that my mom was still refusing to eat, and as soon as I pulled the phone away from my face, I felt a little pebble on my tongue and, sure enough, a piece of tooth had fallen away. That happened three times in three different spots in my mouth.
You know that stress dream you have where your teeth fall out? That was literally happening to me.
Barely at middle-age, I was made Rumi’s stinking-mouthed crone again by the kind of intense stress that can only be brought on by loving someone, perhaps too much.
Another face of the gods—another actual definition of “the Lover”—the one who loves at great personal cost and goes on loving even when things are falling apart—even if those things are the very self.
Isn’t that what “the Lover” is about? A love that is beyond the physical? A love that is beyond the self?
Having been deeply guilty of this myself, let’s move forward together not judging people for the gaps in their smiles or the holes in their heads or the worry lines around their eyes and in their foreheads. Chances are these perceived flaws were caused either by lack or by love. If by lack, our Pagan gods charge us to love and serve those who lack. If by love, our gods charge us to love and joy with those who love. This is us, and our gods in us, at our very best.
Blessings My Friends,
-M. Ashley
Priestess Devotee, Temple Mercury
Temple Mercury 