"Who Told You That?"

How one question unraveled a story I'd believed since childhood

I’ve spent most of my life believing I’m not pretty.

If there was a singular moment when I realized it, I was too young to log it to memory. My understanding is the culmination of a lifetime of jabs, like my mom’s reminders that I had to “work harder” to look presentable, or my German great-grandmother’s penchant for poking my muffin top and saying, in her slight accent, “You must reduce!” or my grandmother’s constant observation, “Your hair is so stringy.”

I come from a long line of critical women—three generations of them. They’re all gone now, but their judgments remain. As does their love, which is no small thing. Paradoxically, I never had one without the other.

As a child, on the playground, I collected every cruel taunt like discarded shotgun shells on a shooting range. “Fatty, fatty, two-by-four!” Pick it up, hold it close, pretend it didn’t hurt because it didn’t kill you. The insults I heard, coupled with the criticism at home, slowly began to mold me into a young woman who knew she would never be good enough. Not because they were valid, but because I believed them.

I married Peter, a man who, at least for a brief, shimmering time early in our relationship, made me believe he thought I was gorgeous and sexy. I almost felt pretty when I was with him. But eventually, I realized he’d been one of those angler fish lurking at the bottom of the sea with his physical compliments like a tiny bioluminescent light dangling before his toothy maw, a lure I’d followed readily.

I stayed with Mr. Angler Fish long after the glow of his “angle” faded. It didn’t take long before a wicked combination of stress, cortisol, and sleeping too much—a coping mechanism I’d begun using to escape my volatile marriage—caused my weight to balloon. And that’s when Peter started taking shots, too. “Even your mom says she’s never seen you this big,” he told me. Peter, who weighed over 300 pounds and had type 2 diabetes, never seemed to find the irony.

I just accepted the reality of who I’d come to believe I was: a woman past her prime who’d never truly had a prime to begin with.

I was forty-nine when the next blow landed with a cruelty only nature can heap on a woman who already knows she’ll never be conventionally attractive. It arrived the way these things always seem to: while I was standing in front of a mirror.

I was gingerly brushing my teeth when I felt something odd and lumpy on my tongue. I spit into the sink and yelped when I saw my front tooth lying there among the toothpaste foam. I plucked it out and rinsed my mouth. Then I grimaced at myself in the mirror, tears streaming down my face, as I stared at the gaping hole in what should have been my smile. I wrapped the tooth in toilet paper and flushed it, as though hiding the evidence would somehow make the horror go away.

How could this happen? I remembered that, while pulling up the covers the night before, my hand had slipped and I’d comically punched myself in the mouth. I’d laughed at my foolishness and then gone to sleep. Maybe that punch was the reason the tooth was gone now. How silly, I could tell that to the dentist when I made an emergency appointment. Surely, he’d get me a new tooth right away.

But the dentist was not kind. In fact, he acted almost hostile as he poked around in my mouth muttering to his assistant, “All of her teeth are mobile!”

“I can’t do anything about this,” he finally said. “You need dentures.”

“But I’m not even fifty!”

“Well, maybe you lost the genetic lottery. Some people have lower resistance to infections like gingivitis. But it looks like you haven’t had very good dental care.”

He wasn’t wrong. Before the catastrophe that sent me to the dentist, I’d been fretting over my front tooth. It felt loose and wiggly, a sensation I hadn’t experienced since losing my baby teeth as a child. But this time I wasn’t excited by a childhood right of passage. I was afraid to smile, and horrified by the prospect of going to the dentist. I ignored the problem, hoping, with the futility of the fearful, that it would just go away if I brushed even more often and used an anti-bacterial mouthwash.

But of course, it didn’t.

My mother had instilled the fear of dentists in me at a young age. She was terrified of the men with the whirring drills, and so I only saw a dentist twice before I reached adulthood. He was a pediatric dentist named Doctor Bittner who held me still by drilling his knee into my chest, pinning me to the chair while he scolded me for squirming. When he finally let me up, he scowled and said I’d been bad. His assistant talked him into grudgingly allowing me to pick a cheap plastic toy out of the cheap plastic treasure chest he kept in his exam room for “good kids only.”

I have a family history of autoimmune disorders. Later, kinder dentists would tell me that autoimmune issues and a lack of dental care had probably played a significant role in the state of my mouth. But, at that time, I was certain it was all my fault and I was destined to become a toothless hag. People would look at me and judge — drug user, hick, white trash.

The dentist did not simply pop in a new tooth, as I’d foolishly hoped. He gave me a pamphlet about dentures, told me they were expensive, and suggested I call him back when I was ready to invest.

But at that time, I was far from financially stable enough to pay for extensive dental work. I’d summoned the courage to leave Peter and was living on my own. I didn’t have thousands of dollars to spend on what the brochures advertised as: “A new smile, a new you!” I was barely scraping by, keeping the kids and I fed and housed.

As teeth tend to do, mine shifted and moved closer together and eventually almost filled in the gap. By the time I lost the next front tooth, the one that had been adjacent to the first one to jump ship, I was living in Washington state, two-thousand miles away from my ancestral home.

* * * *

“Smile for me,” Mark said. I grinned toothily while looking at myself in a handheld mirror. “You look beautiful!” he enthused. “That’s a Hollywood smile!”

Mark was my denturist. He’d created a new set of teeth for me so I wouldn’t have to be humiliated by my gap-toothed smile any longer. I could smile with confidence. Mark put a hand on my shoulder and asked, “What do you think?”

“Dey wook gweat,” I mumbled. My mouth was packed with gauze around and beneath the new dentures. But my smile did look “gweat” nonetheless.

After recovering from the anesthesia and pain medication, I would find myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror smiling. Something I’d never experienced before was happening—I actually liked my smile. It was the kind of smile that could finally reflect the growing love I had for Washington and the new friends I was beginning to make. A smile I actually wanted to greet people with.

By the following week, I was back to singing with my choir. Choral singing, and music in general, has always brought me peace and contentment. It was only after I separated from Peter and began reinventing myself that I found music again.

Although I was worried that my choir friends would notice the sudden change in my appearance, no one said a word, and soon I was smiling confidently and singing with a joy I hadn’t been able to experience when I felt compelled to hide my failing teeth.

I found my tribe in the Pacific Northwest, an enclave of liberal hippies like me. They are artists, poets, dancers, and musicians. Earth mothers and moon dogs. I discovered people to love, and people who love me.

And in my new home, I also met the love of my life, John.

One night, John and I were curled up together watching a movie in which the main character attended a formal dance. John asked if I’d ever experienced a formal.

“Oh, that’s for pretty people,” I answered, half joking. “I’m not pretty.”

John didn’t appreciate my self-deprecating joke. He turned to me, his eyes narrowed, and said, “Who told you that?”

I took a beat. It was the first time anyone had ever challenged the story instead of either dismissing it or agreeing with it.

“I … lots of people,” I said.

“Yourself? Did you tell yourself that?”

John seemed angry. Not with me, but with the voices in my head. I’d rarely seen him this fierce.

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“Don’t believe it,” he commanded, as if his directive was the final word.

I let John’s words settle over me, and something began to shift. “Not pretty” was a tale I’d told myself since childhood. But much like a fairytale, myth, or urban legend, just because the tale endured didn’t make it true.

Yes, society has some standards I don’t meet. By society’s standards, it’s possible that I am not pretty, and I never will be.

But I am strong. And I’m so much wiser than I was when I listened to the voices of my matriarchs, peers, and ex-husband, letting their criticisms become my story. Today, I have a different story to tell.

Now that I’ve found my place in life, I understand that I’m enough. I’ve opened myself to people and found that I am welcomed, appreciated, and respected.

Most of all, I’m not valuable because someone chose me; I’m valuable because I am me.

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Peace & love,

Karen