Body Talk

by Kelly Jensen

  I think a lot of us think we need to put on a show in life. A performance. Maybe it’s an act to get a job. A metaphorical social dance to make friends. Maybe it’s to fall in love. To look like the person you think you need to be, instead of the person you are. And I just want to tell you this: Be. Who. You. Are.

  I think back to my smart-ass remarks to the kids who picked on me. The words my parents told me to fire back. “Someday when you’re a man, you’ll understand.”

  And now I do.

  But I still don’t want to hear your little brother sing “Jingle Bells.”

  Sixty-Four Teeth

  by Sara Saedi

  My parents forced me to get braces at the tender and turbulent age of thirteen. I had no say in the matter. They didn’t care that the thirty-two (albeit very crooked) teeth resided in my mouth. If I wanted to get married, get a job, have any future at all, I had to fix my smile.

  I remember trying to reason with them on the way home from the orthodontist’s office:

  “I have personality. I don’t need to be beautiful!”

  “Why do I have to go to an Iranian orthodontist with bad breath?”

  “Death to America’s obsession with dental hygiene!”

  But they were unmoved. It was one of the rare instances in our relationship where my opinion was irrelevant.

  Eleven years prior, we’d escaped Tehran in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, but when it came to the subject of my teeth, my parents were as tyrannical as the Ayatollah.

  “You’ll thank us one day,” was all they said in response.

  I was too respectful (and afraid) to say that I hated my parents out loud, so instead, I repeated the words in my head like a teenage war cry. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.

  I’m fairly certain that the status of my dad’s teeth never crossed my mind on that drive home. But as a kid, I used to hang out in the bathroom and observe his strict dental regimen. He was religious about flossing, brushing, and swigging mouthwash, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at him. For starters, he’d been a smoker before I was born, and his crooked teeth never recovered from their exposure to nicotine.

  Braces hadn’t existed in Iran when he was growing up. In fact, it wasn’t until 1975 that a group of American-trained orthodontists would be invited to Tehran University to train Iranian students. Once advances were made in the field of orthodontics, demand for braces would still outweigh the supply of orthodontists. Straight teeth would become a luxury afforded only to the elite. Dental work was never an option for my dad. And yet, he kept flossing and brushing and swigging mouthwash. He had no intention of giving up on his teeth.

  My dad always had a gregarious personality. He’s cheerful and upbeat and the type of guy most people love instantly. He may have been self-conscious about smiling with his teeth showing, but it’s hard to stay tight-lipped when you’re regularly brimming with joy. I love his outgoing side. I love that he talks to the clerk at the grocery store or a stranger on the street like he’s known them his whole life. But as a teenager, I worried those same people might judge him at the sight of his stained and imperfect teeth. I worried his mouth was just another sign of our foreignness. I had frequent bouts of anxiety over how different we were from my American friends’ families. Anxiety that was compounded by a family secret I’d discovered: we were undocumented immigrants.

  It was my older sister who unceremoniously broke the news of our immigration status to me. Despite the fact that we’d lived in the Bay Area for over a decade, we didn’t have green cards. At the time, my sister and I didn’t even have Social Security numbers. We’d escaped Iran as refugees but entered the United States on visitor visas. When they expired, we applied for political asylum, but after two years, we were told there was no record of our application. Our only hope was getting green cards through my uncle, who was an American citizen. So we filed our applications and waited and waited and waited.

  Our undocumented status was the reason I had to go to the Iranian orthodontist with halitosis. He generously gave us his friends-and-family rate for my braces. This was a necessary savings for my parents. Being undocumented came with an array of financial burdens. It meant paying a lawyer to help get my sister and me Social Security numbers. It also meant not being able to apply for financial aid when my sister went off to college. My parents would have to pay for her education in full. For small-business owners, this was a behemoth expense.

  Braces were not exactly cost-prohibitive, but my teeth required a lot of work. I had to start with a palatal expander to widen my upper jaw. This is a metal contraption (or torture device) that’s secured to your top molars and sits below the roof of your mouth. It has a tiny screw that you turn with a small metal key each day to help move your teeth apart. If that wasn’t humiliating enough, it also made me speak with a lisp.

  After six months of properly widening my jaw, I was finally ready for braces. I was happy I could feel the roof of my mouth again, but I hated the layer of metal that masked my teeth. I dreaded the monthly appointments where I had to get my wires upgraded and tightened. The orthodontist’s office was a trek from our house, which gave me ample time to bitch and moan to my mom on the ride home. My teeth hurt. The edge of the wire was cutting into my cheeks. I was in agony.

  “Bemeeram barat,” my mom would say. “I’ll die for you.” It’s what Persian parents frequently say to their kids when they voice even the slightest discomfort.

  “I’m tired.”

  “I’ll die for you.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “I’ll die for you.”

  “I’m bloated.”

  “I’ll die for you.”

  “Khoda nakoneh,” I’d mumble in reply. “God forbid.”

  My braces came off during my sophomore year of high school. By then, I was consumed with other insecurities: bad skin, a boyish physique, a stereotypically large Iranian nose. There wasn’t much I liked about myself. But for once, I was giddy as my mom drove us home from my appointment. I kept gliding my tongue along my teeth, stunned by the sensation. And I couldn’t stop smiling at myself in the car visor mirror.

  My parents and all my friends agreed: my teeth were perfect.

  “Thank you,” I finally told my parents.

  But as my dad proudly smiled back at me, my joy was quickly replaced with guilt.

  One day, I told myself, I’ll be successful, I’ll have a lot of money, and I’ll return the favor.

  Three weeks later, I was in the throes of every teenager’s worst nightmare: I’d lost my retainer. I’d wrapped it in a paper towel during a meal and accidentally thrown it away. I frantically dug through the trash in our backyard, praying to the universe that I would find it. I never did. My parents would have to spend a few hundred dollars to replace it to keep my perfect teeth intact. I hated myself for being so irresponsible. This time, tears accompanied the guilt.

  For most children of immigrants, guilt is a familiar emotion. Hell, it’s more like a state of being. We don’t require verbal reminders of our parents’ sacrifices. We bear witness to them every day. We can see it on their tired faces when they come home from a job that pays the bills but wasn’t what they’d dreamed of doing with their lives. We can see it in the faraway look in their eyes when they wax nostalgic about a country they loved but had to leave. We can see it when they sheepishly ask us to proofread something they’ve written for grammatical or spelling errors, when they fumble or get embarrassed because the person on the other end of the phone can’t understand what they’re saying. All parenting requires some form of sacrifice, but not all parents choose a lifetime of feeling marginalized so their children can flourish and bask in the freedoms they were denied.

  It would take more than twenty grueling years for our family to become American citizens. My parents were relieved when our immigration ordeal was finally over, but that doesn’t mean t
hey live in a country that makes them feel American.

  A few years ago, my mom and dad downsized their lives, sold their house in Silicon Valley, and purchased a condo in the less expensive town of Brisbane, California. They can’t afford to retire, but they’ve finally been able to put some money away.

  At seventy years old, my dad got his teeth fixed. I never did make good on the promise I had made to myself. He covered all his own dental bills. His smile is beautiful now, but it was beautiful then, too. It was, after all, the marker of my happy childhood.

  At thirty-seven, I still feel pangs of guilt when someone compliments my straight teeth.

  “I had braces,” I always explain.

  But there’s more to the story. My teeth, my smile, are evidence of immigrant parents, who would do anything for me.

  This piece was previously published on LennyLetter.com.

  Flock by Kelly Bastow

  Not by the Hair on My Chinny Chin Chin

  by Kelly Jensen

  I stare at my face more than the average person does.

  Or rather, I stare at my chin more than the average person likely even thinks about theirs. It’s not that it’s too round or too square, too sharp or too soft. My chin is perfectly suited for my face and for my body.

  I stare at it because it’s peppered with sharp black hairs every single day.

  Whereas many cis women don’t deal with a secondary sex characteristic typical of cis men, I’m one of the lucky ones who wake up each morning with a need to pull out their sharpest tweezers and stand in the most well-lit bathroom in the house to spend upward of half an hour pulling out the stubborn hairs. Going hair by hair, the process is exhausting on my hands, which cramp up from such precise plucking. I’ve made my way through more than one pair of the best tweezers on earth because the idea of sending my tweezers in for a sharpening and being left without a pair to use on the daily—or worse, having to wait upward of two to three weeks to get them back—isn’t something I can imagine. I too-regularly think about a meme that pops up periodically on social media about how if a girl is in the hospital, her bestie will show up and pluck that one annoying chin hair before anyone else notices, and I feel a tingling sensation, wondering how anyone would have the patience to do that for me.

  Or worse, how I could trust anyone to even know I needed to do this much work to keep my chin stubble-free.

  It began in college. My body began rounding out more and more, the bulk of my weight resting right in my middle. I’d always been fat; pictures of the women on my mom’s side of the family showcase the same stocky body type generation after generation. We have German bodies made for working in fields, hauling goods, and carrying babies. Add to that the Sicilian heritage on my dad’s side, and my body was, from the beginning, meant to be bigger than average.

  But it wasn’t a freshman fifteen I gained. Nor was it a freshman twenty or thirty. It was a freshman fifty, followed over the next few years by roughly fifty more pounds, which stuck to my body.

  Along with the added weight and new first digit on my clothing size, my skin continued to be riddled with acne. I’d always had rough, zit-prone skin, but I’d been promised again and again that it’d get better as I got older.

  But it didn’t. It only got worse, and after I tried out several medications before college and didn’t see any positive results, it felt pointless to try again. Bad skin was my destiny, and though it was annoying, I’d acquired enough skill at covering it up with makeup that I knew I could eventually learn to live with it.

  Then there was the hair.

  It began slowly. A rogue chin hair or two would pop up once a week or so, and it wasn’t hard to get rid of them. I even made a joke to a high school friend one night online that I’d gotten my first chin hair, meaning that I was now officially “old.” We laughed about it, exchanging weird body experiences that we’d each had, and chalked them up to “just getting old!”

  By senior year of college, though, things took a decidedly unfunny turn. Though I lived with a roommate and had a long-term boyfriend, I feared what would happen if I had to travel or fell asleep in a friend’s room one night. The chin hair had become not a weekly challenge, but a daily one. I’d sometimes come back to my room at two or three in the morning after a long night editing the school’s newspaper and turn on the desk lamp, which emitted the perfect amount of unnatural light to show me just how bad the trail of hair had grown in the last twenty-four hours. I’d pluck until they were all gone, leaving my tweezers in the same cup as my pens and highlighters. It was a key tool, as much as the writing utensils, in my daily arsenal.

  I convinced myself the hair was obvious. Minutes of plucking turned into tens of minutes, and never once did I consider that I should get it checked out. My mom had chin hairs, I told myself, and there’s nothing wrong with her. If it was something I should worry about, I believed she or anyone else who was very clearly noticing this about me would say something.

  No one did.

  Plucking my chin hair became as routine as things like brushing my teeth. I did it because it was part of the routine. Except not only did I never talk about it, but I put off seeking help for it. And worse, I began fearing what would happen if anyone found out. Anxiety clawed at me whenever I was invited to stay somewhere overnight, which might mean spending time with someone in the morning before I could get in the bathroom and pluck. I checked the websites of hotels I’d be sharing with other people, making sure the bathroom had a sink and a mirror behind a door, rather than out in the open. If I couldn’t figure it out beforehand, the bathroom check was the first thing I’d do when walking into a room. And if it was one of those setups where there was a door separating the sink area from the shower area, I’d set my alarm so I could wake up much earlier than any of my roommates so they wouldn’t notice how long I spent behind the locked door and think it was weird.

  Keeping up this routine was exhausting on every level. I also knew that continuing to pretend the problem didn’t exist was, in fact, a significant part of the problem.

  On a routine visit to my doctor, after she’d done a breast and pelvic exam, I said something.

  She sat back in her chair and listened to me talk about all the things I’d been documenting over the last ten years. The weight I’d gained—some of which had been lost through both healthy and unhealthy means, but which was, ultimately, something I’d come to accept as part of who I was—nonstop acne, a painful and embarrassing recurring boil at the root of my breast, and finally, the part that was hardest to choke out: the hair.

  I had done my research over the years because, despite not wanting to know, I desperately wanted to know. I’d found forums and web pages dedicated to people who had many similar physical symptoms. Within those forums, I’d found cis women who, unlike me, had allowed their chin hairs to grow out, not caring at all what other people might think. I remember a late-night search led me to a woman who not only let the hair grow out but dyed it funky colors, carrying pride in something that—for me—was a trait to be ashamed of. What all those searches amounted to was a potential diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). I asked my doctor what she thought, and she sat with me in that office for far longer than most doctors would, poring over guides and diagnostic tools she had on hand. She agreed it sounded quite like what I’d described, and she wrote me a referral to a specialist in women’s reproductive issues to get a diagnosis that she wasn’t qualified to give.

  The postdiagnosis years could be described in only one word: maddening. The thing about PCOS is that it’s not a condition one can readily diagnose. It’s a collection of symptoms that are lumped together as a diagnosis after all other possible avenues are traversed. This meant I gave a lot of blood, a lot of time, and a lot of tears to come to a potential conclusion about the chin hair, weight gain, irregular menstrual cycle, and acne. I wasn’t diabetic. I wasn’t struggling with a thyroid condition.
I didn’t have X or Y or Z. I didn’t even have ovarian cysts—which, despite the condition’s name, a person doesn’t need to have in order to be diagnosed with PCOS. PCOS itself isn’t a reproductive issue, either. It’s an endocrine disorder.

  More frustratingly, there’s no cure. Despite the fact one in ten people with uteri have PCOS, there’s infuriatingly little research for a cure or even a way to solidly diagnose the issue. Instead, the symptoms are simply managed, one by one.

  My doctor suggested birth control. She said I’d see my skin clear up and it was possible the chin hair would become less noticeable. It worked for my skin, but did nothing for the hair. I stuck with the pills, though, because for the first time in my life, my skin was clear.

  But with gorgeously clear skin came a new discovery: the chin hair became more obvious on my pale white skin. Or, at least, it became more obvious to me.

  I spent a few days with a friend in her tiny city apartment, and with the tiny apartment came a tiny bathroom. This bathroom had no windows, and the only light was a buttery yellow overhead. No matter how many ways I maneuvered myself in there, I could not make out what my chin hairs looked like.

  That morning I did what I’d never done before: I told someone about this struggle and how frustrating it was.

  Her kitchen window had beautiful light, and it overlooked an empty courtyard. I took my hand mirror and tweezers out and sat on the sill. She grabbed a seat at the table as I began the plucking process, one hair at a time, my chin tilted toward the world outside. I told her how annoying this routine was and that my chin hair caused the weirdest, deepest sense of shame about my body. I didn’t care about the acne. I didn’t care about being fat—I embraced that. The fact that I was missing one of my front teeth was more of a fun fact than something to be ashamed of—that you couldn’t tell, thanks to modern orthodontics, certainly didn’t hurt. I’d stopped shaving my legs that year, wearing shorts and skirts more frequently than I ever had before, not caring if someone was turned off by my not conforming to societal expectations for women’s hairless legs. It was too much work for too little reward.