Metal Mouth

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I once had braces, but I still have all this metal in my mouth. It’s kind of metal though. In a medieval, torture device kind of way. Like those monks that self-flatulate or wear hair shirts to show their intense devotion? Except my mouth has been broken by me by accident. I ground my teeth and clenched my jaw from aggressions others called micro. I now just call it racism. There’s nothing microaggressive about a condition that leads to jaw surgery.

I didn’t mean to be a martyr for the cause with all my metal, but the problem with being an educator is that you can’t turn it off. It’s so much a part of you, it subsumes you. There is no you, just whatever you teach. And it happened to me, this devouring. A metal mouth, institutionalized trap of education, and you become a pipeline. You become a channel of dreams or a designated dreambreaker, and there was so much pressure, so much torque. Like brackets and wires do, you make students move like teeth do. Slowly, begrudgingly. You ache, they ache. You are a tool of precision and pain both.

You become so much a part of the construct, you forget you were meant to be human. And it hurts. Everything hurts. Or it doesn’t when you do as some people threaten and become steel-spined.

There is no painkiller for this, not really. No Tylenol or Motrin or Advil to numb it, but why would I? No Novocaine for this thrumming in my veins. This isn’t right, this isn’t it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was more of a moving apology than a teacher. They held a metal detector to my throat daily and, every time the alarm beeped, I was forced into beg-pardons for all the steel that held me together.

Sensitive. That’s what they called me, sometimes to my face but most of the time to my back. I always hated that term. It always was used by misguided mentors to make me feel as if my emotions showed them how fragile I was, how delicate. Even Frida Kahlo’s declaration that I’m as delicate as a bomb did nothing to soothe how wired my heart was. I don’t just want to keep teaching in classrooms after being in classrooms that forgot who I was or didn’t care. I sometimes feel like a failure for stepping away, and I sometimes wonder if this time is just a waste, or that I’m a waste, or that I’m wasting away. Tick, tick, tick goes the countdown.

This peace that envelops me now feels like a delicate bomb. It is fragile. It is sensitive. It makes time precious. I often find myself looking around incredulously, dumbfounded at the small, daily kindnesses. A gray-muzzled lab-terrier with daintily crossed paws, sighing at my incessant typing. Acrylic swathes of paint caressing a canvas for hours. A silence that demands nothing from me.

I’m no longer fragile, boarded up by their cardboard walls and packaged demands. I don’t keep looking over my shoulder, wondering if my colleagues are still talking about me “out of care.” That they’re “handling it,” or me with care. But I really didn’t care for that. I’m not a thing. I’m not precious, but I’m certainly not a project. And it was always kind of…bullshit to me.

No, I don’t have a steel spine, but I have a metal trap of a mouth. Like Sylvia, I bite. I smile, but all you see is disaster or maybe weapons or maybe barbed wire protection. My mouth is sharp and snappy. I don’t take complaints lightly, and I don’t remember what it feels like anymore, to not have metal in me.

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