Random Memory

 I was thinking today about how my daughter is turning 18 in five short days, and how she’ll be allowed to make her own choices now. 

I got braces when I was 15. Three years later, I still had them on. I didn’t want them to stay on though. All of my friends who had braces only had them for a year or so. Plus it was painful. 

As soon as I learned that I had the choice to make my own medical decisions at age 18, I went to my orthodontist and asked nicely but firmly to have them removed. They were PISSED.  I actually don't know how I had the strength to do that. They were all much older and the pleasant demeanor they had for the past three years turned quickly into anger when I tried to exercise my right. 

So he took them off. They gave me a retainer. The extremely pissed office manager told me that if I didn’t wear the retainer for the rest of my life, the teeth would go all the way back to how crooked they were three years earlier. 

I believed her. I mean, when you’re young, you have no choice but to believe older people. Thirty years ago they knew that. So I think a lot of them exaggerated things on purpose, not thinking that someday we’d figure out how wrong they were about a lot of things. 

I hated the retainer too. Food got trapped in it, and it was disgusting. I couldn’t clean it constantly. I wore it for a month, and one day while driving down the road, I rolled my window down while driving and tossed it in the desert. I feel bad now for littering, but I don’t feel bad for going against the advice of the office manager. I’m now almost 47, and she was indeed wrong. My teeth didn’t move all the way back to where they were at age 15.