Backstory 13: Love and lost teeth

Whenever someone asks me to take a selfie with them they always have to remind me to smile. A habit I learned a long time ago was to hide my smile, because I was self conscious of how it looked, so this is the story behind my smile...

Once upon a Christmas Eve in Salt Lake City, Utah in 2010, I was technically single, but I really wanted to be in love. and I thought I was one big Christmas gift away from achieving girlfriend status from a boy I'd liked for a while. And so what does a girl do when she wants to shift a relationship status from boy-friend to boyfriend? She creates an epic and adventurous multi location scavenger hunt for him, of course. His name was Nathan and I’d met him on Match.com, and he was a preacher's son who also played the guitar, and that was a recipe for divine love (in my thinking at the time).

We’d been hanging out as mostly friends for a few months, but I wanted something more official, so it was time to put myself out there and make my intention clear. So I created a city wide scavenger hunt, with love notes and clues at each stop, that culminated in a gift certificate for a massage from me. The scavenger hunt started the 23rd of December at a coffee shop he frequented, and there were 5 "stops" for him to make, hoping that with each stop his affection and love for me would grow, and we'd have some sort of fairy tale outcome.

And, as you can imagine, when you put a preacher's son up on a pedestal, and project unachievable fairy tale circumstances onto him, things never end well, and neither did this bold display of my affection for his attention.

Christmas Day arrived and I knew he'd gotten each of his clues, and I proudly called him to hear how excited he was about his massage with me, and I wanted to bathe in his gratitude and pronouncement of love for me.

But it didn't go that way.

And I knew it right when he picked up the phone, and my heart sank a little because I felt the gentle let down coming in his voice when he greeted me. And I was immediately embarrassed by all the trouble and time I'd spent scattering these damn scavenger Christmas gifts around town.

I heard him take a deep breath into the phone before he began to speak.

"Harriet, I got all your presents and this is undoubtedly the nicest and most romantic thing anyone, and any girl has ever done for me (inner voice: yay!)...

"But...   *(I hate buts)

"this feels like the kind of thing a girlfriend would do for her boyfriend for Christmas, and that's not how I feel about you. I love you like a dear friend."

He then immediately shifted into a more chipper friendly familiar tone

"but you are welcome to come over for Christmas breakfast with my family because my parents love you."

I felt a stab of pain in my chest. What?!

It felt like my love plane just crash landed, and my heart was splattered everywhere around us; and he wanted me to come over for breakfast and hang out? What the f&%*.

I begrudgingly accepted, and knew that my attendance would dig this nail into my heart just a little deeper, but honestly I had nowhere else to go for Christmas that I felt comfortable. I'd spent the previous year alone because I was sick and single, and I didn't want that to happen again.

Christmas had changed a lot over the years since my parents split up in 2004, and I often felt like an orphan on major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, adopting families around town to share the festivities with. And because I had spent Thanksgiving with this Nathan's family, I'd already set my sights on hanging with them for Christmas, so I agreed, even though I felt awkward for being cemented into the friend zone.

I drove the hour commute to his parents home in Riverdale, Utah, and could feel my heart aching the closer I got. I felt sad that I'd offered my heart to someone who didn't want me and also pretty embarrassed that all his friends (and mine) knew I'd just created a pretty elaborate scavenger hunt for him expressing my love, and I'd been given the friend card as a thank you.

Heartbreak wasn't something I was familiar with because I'd always done a marvelous job of heading it off before it hit me, by breaking up with guys before they had a chance to hurt or dump me, but I'd fallen hard for the preacher's son, right from the beginning. But he hadn't joined me in the fall.

Our meeting was intriguing from the start, and it didn't bother me that were no sparks at first; because great relationships can begin as friendships. Nathan inspired me to question my spiritual beliefs and habits, which felt interesting, and he invited me to attend a rock n roll church with him fairly regularly, which could have been weird, but somehow it wasn't. This edgy new kind of faith was a welcomed change to both my growing disbelief in life, and the stuffy episcopal upbringing I had. The love in me was beginning to brew, and it was a different feeling than anything I'd felt before, so I attributed this feeling all to him. Lucky guy. 

That Christmas family breakfast after my rejection was oddly quite peaceful; I sat at the long breakfast table, with the family of my boy-friend, passing the food around the table, quietly taking an inventory of my life and wondering how I got here.

Here I was 33, a business owner and massage therapist, and I'd created my dream job at my spa, and absolutely loved every person who I worked with. However, my romantic life was very lonely and had a lot to be desired, and I'd turn to Match.com to fill the hole in my heart that I wasn't taking time to fill myself. And I was beginning to see that the preacher's son was just there to show me a path to what I needed to develop some faith in myself.

But how the hell was I going to get myself out of this love mess I'd created for myself this Christmas? I'd given my power away to this guy, and he let me know gently and lovingly that he didn't want it, but I'd revolved my life around his interests, so now it felt incredibly awkward to just hug goodbye, and take back the dish of love I'd served up so freely the night before. Sure we were still friends and I wanted it to stay that way, which made things even more tricky to navigate.

As I was beginning to leave his parents' house, the offer to ski the following day came up, and it was going to be a big group of people, so I felt my happy meter begin to shift, because skiing always brought me great joy and it was something I was very good at, so maybe I could show off a little, to boost my self esteem from just getting dumped into the friend zone for Christmas.

I drove home that Christmas night with my heart in pieces, and began to pray that my focus and attention be taken away from this guy, because it didn't feel like something I could do myself. So I called in and was open to whatever was bigger than me...God, Angels, the Universe, I didn't know who was listening, nor did I care who picked up the proverbial phone, I just needed assistance to move through this heartbreak.

I didn't know what in the world could scoop me out of this heartbreak, but I asked for something significant, some kind of miracle, because heartbreak on Christmas sucked, and I cried myself to sleep that night.

The following morning we had a group of about 7 hitting the slopes, and it was a day of flat light, which means it's tougher to ski because you can't see the bumps in the snow.  My energy level was pretty low from crying and I wasn't particularly excited about anything, so I just let my body take over the skiing part, because it knew what to do.  Plus I didn't need to pay too much attention because we were just warming up on a blue slope and I'd been skiing since I was 3.

I waited for everyone to get off the chair lift, and then away I went down the mountain; and yes, there was a little bit of boldness in my skiing, because I was the most advanced skier in the group, which I loved.

I did a few fancy fast turns, but when we rounded a corner, I felt my heart race because my speed was a little faster than I'd intended. I also noticed the snow was sticky, so I leaned forward into my turns. Then out out of nowhere, I felt my right ski pole stick in the snow, which jolted me like a whiplash, and almost made me lose my balance, but I was able to safely stop my momentum to pull my pole out from the snow's sticky hold.

But apparently, I pulled too  hard.

The pole released easier than I anticipated, so my own momentum threw me quickly backwards and I saw my own fist coming straight towards my mouth and I heard a crunch. Yes, I'd just punched myself in the face with my own ski pole.

Everything went into slow motion after that.

My mouth filled with liquid and what felt like a bunch of pebbles and I began to spit out bright red chunks of skin and teeth out into the snow. "Holy shit", I yelled, realizing in shock and disbelief that I'd just knocked my teeth out!!!!!

Just as I was beginning to take in the enormity of what happened, Nathan skied up to the scene and asked if I was ok.

Ummm, no, I'm not.

The roof of my mouth felt like it was a war zone, I couldn't feel any of my front teeth, and there was blood around me everywhere. Merry Christmas to me. And being the strong soul that I am, I insisted on skiing the remainder of the way down, rather than contacting ski patrol, because needless to say, I was in shock. But I skied down slowly, marking my route with a trail of blood, teeth and tears. My self talk was brutal and I was convinced this was the end of my dating life. Because who'd want to date a girl with no teeth?

Once we reached the bottom of the hill, my girlfriend Jessa was by my side and I drummed up everything in me to smile at her, and said, "how does it look in there?" Giving her a front row seat to my mouth.

"Sweetie, how about we get you to the doctor, and you don't look in the mirror."

Wise advice. And away we went to the E.R.

Once there, they sedated me to where I was almost laughing from the pain, as the nurses asked me who my family dentist was. Family dentist? That felt so 90's to me, since for the last few years, I'd been that girl bouncing around from dentist to dentist, depending on when I had a cavity, where I was living, who was open, and who had a Groupon deal on filling a cavity.  So instead, we turned to the yellow pages and began to call every dentist in the Park City area, to see who would answer their phone and rescue me on this Sunday, the day after Christmas.

Fortunately for us, Dr. Innis answered his phone, and Jessa escorted me to his dental office, where he'd be meeting us shortly.

We arrived at the same time, and I humbly stood behind him as he unlocked the door and took me straight back, turning on the lights as we went. I got into the dental chair and a little piece of me relaxed. I stared up at the dental light and so many thoughts crossed my mind, like how the hell am I going to pay for this, how much is this going to cost, what does repairing a mouth of crushed teeth entail and what the hell am I going to do about the people on my massage schedule this week, some of whom had been waiting all year to see me.  I watched each thought dance through my mind, seeking an answer or a solution.

But luckily, what didn't cross my mind was my heartbreak surrounding the preachers son. It was all but forgotten.

My prayer had been answered. Just not in a way I'd expected.

What did come through as I laid in that chair staring up at a ceiling I'd come to be very familiar with over the next 3 years of mouth reconstruction, was a phone call from my dad, who I'd texted a "911 call me" message to. Jessa answered the phone and filled him in on some details, and she handed me the phone for me to listen to him, since my mouth was busy with the doctor in it.

"Harriet, it's your father; don't worry, I'll help you with the expenses of this, so just do your best to rest and relax. Call me when you can, love dad...." Click. He hung up.

And with those words, every muscle in my body relaxed, and though my mouth was a total shit show, my dad helped me find the faith, courage and support to endure the toughest part of the journey; I just needed to know I wasn't alone in this mess, or in life, and that he was there to help.

And yes, it took several years to reconstruct my mouth, and it involved many different expensive and humbling stages, one of which was to extract the remainder of my 4 front teeth, and wait 8 months for my gums to heal, enough for my replacement teeth to get installed. So I was the single girl in her mid 30's who had the party trick of being able to remove her fake teeth because they were on a retainer, aka a "flipper."

That time that I was toothless, I stayed away from men, and it was the greatest self reflection time I've ever unexpectedly gifted myself; it was a permission slip to slow down, go inward, find yoga and take my focus away from finding my soulmate, and shift it to healing my inner self and my perception of my outer self.

I recommend this sort of self healing time for everyone, because it helped me build a new foundation in my self, that was rooted in love and acceptance (though I certainly don't want you to have to knock out your teeth to reserve this space).

Rest and healing is one of the most important practices you can gift yourself, especially during the holidays, so that you can be your best, and deliver your best. It's a win-win for you and all your loved ones.

And as for the 2010 Christmas scavenger hunt I created for the preacher's son who wasn't supposed to love me, it's now just a funny story to share to my daughters, with the message to not try and win the love of a partner who's not into you. With the right guy you'll know.

Trust the perfection of the journey, and do your best to enjoy it, teeth or no teeth.

And if you feel called to create a knockout gift for someone, please do it safely.

Much love,