spinofflive
Sunday-Essay-Ant-Sang-Girl-in-the-Sundress-Feature-Image.jpg

The Sunday EssayAugust 14, 2022

The Sunday Essay: The girl in the sundress, standing in front of the shed

Sunday-Essay-Ant-Sang-Girl-in-the-Sundress-Feature-Image.jpg

Because I was six when my grandfather died and we have super dysfunctional dynamics, I don’t really know what happened in my family.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand

Original illustration by Ant Sang.


There are two photos of me, taken the same day, from that summer when I was six. I am wearing a red sundress with a print of oversized white daisies and soft ruffles on the shoulders. I’m wearing blue sandals, although it’s hard to tell the colour in the photo, which has that orangey-pink tinge of photos from the late 70s and early 80s. But I remember those blue sandals and how much I loved them.

In one photo I’m alone: the wind has caught my hair and blown it in front of my face. I’ve turned my head slightly away from the wind, while the hem of my dress has been kicked up slightly by the same breeze. My hair hasn’t yet achieved its full curliness, and instead only has a gentle wave through it. I’m leaning against a gigantic tree trunk, one of two tōtara logs waiting to be carved in this massive shed. I’m only in this photo to give some scale to the trunk’s size.

In the other photo I’m standing in the front, with my mother – grandmother and grandfather behind me. My grandfather has his arm draped over my grandmother’s shoulders. There’s a chicken wire fence behind us, and behind the chicken wire is the massive shed with its structural posts painted with kōwhaiwhai and the faces of tīpuna. Behind us and the chicken wire, you can see part of both logs.

This corrugated iron shed – open on two sides – and these tōtara logs are next to my grandparents’ house on Tiraumea Road. It’s the weekend, and the weather is nice so we’d walked over to once again wonder at the size of these logs. I know that the logs are here to be carved into a waka. I don’t understand that the waka is important, that eventually it’ll be sailed from Tahiti back to Aotearoa. I don’t understand how that journey is an important story about finding home. We don’t know it yet, but my grandfather has cancer. We don’t know it yet, but my grandfather will be dead before the end of that summer.

After my grandfather dies, my grandmother will sell the house on Tiraumea Road to the hapū, so that they can expand beyond the land with the shed and two tōtara logs on it. She’ll sell it for less than the market value, and in return the hapū members will carry all of her belongings to her new, smaller house a few streets away, where she’ll continue to raise the two of my cousins she and my grandfather had been guardians of for the last few years. She’ll be in that house for a decade – a tiny two-bedroom house that means one of my cousins will have to sleep in the skinny sunporch – but still, the house on Tiraumea Road is the one I remember better.

I don’t think I ever realised when I was little how poor my grandparents were. Raising nine children in a three-bedroom house would’ve been… a lot. In both physical space and emotional constraint. The house was a villa, but that makes it sounds much posher than it really was, although to young me, with the wooden front porch and the ceilings that were as high as the clouds, it felt like all sorts of fancy.

There was a lot of getting by on what my grandmother grew and cheap meat, which I’d always put down to them being from olden times when people did that, but it seems hardly anyone I know my age had grandparents who were getting by on so little. Or who were raising some of their grandchildren. On weekends we’d have lunch in the kitchen at the marbled formica table, with the wood-burning range taking up half of one long wall. After lunch, if I was helping with the dishes, we would end up with our sides bumping and pressing into each other at the tiny kitchen bench.

Connected to the front porch by a concrete path was the garden gate with the letterbox next to it, but only visitors – not family visiting, but other people visitors – were allowed to come and go through the garden gate. I only remember seeing someone come through the garden gate once, when one of my cousins – the younger sister of the cousins my grandparents were raising – visited with her adoptive parents. They were rich, and this cousin arrived in a white fur coat. With the garden gate open, it felt like seeing the world differently. If you came in through the garden gate you’d see my grandmother’s garden, dense with trees and shrubs and small moments of colour. The grass always seemed to be green and the perfect length.

The footbridge that led to my grandfather’s workshop was two planks wrapped in chicken wire. I was always sure that if I crossed it too slowly, a troll would grab me and eat me. In the summers we – and only that last summer did that we include me, I was too little before that – in the summers, my grandfather and my mother and the youngest of my uncles and my two cousins who lived with my grandparents and maybe one or two other adults, would climb down into the creek bed that ran between my grandfather’s workshop and the house, clearing out weeds and long grass, so that in winter the water would be able to flow as easily as possible if my grandfather had to open the floodgate to let water through. That one summer when I was lowered into the creek as well, I remember the green smell of plants being ripped out and how far above me the ground seemed.

When I checked on google maps, to see if the street really is called Tiraumea Road, I figured I had the right street because where I thought my grandparents’ home was is now a kōhanga reo. I don’t know if the potatoes that my grandmother grew in the gritty dirt to the left of their driveway kept growing until the driveway and dirt next to it were dug up to make a space for parents to drop off and pick up their kids. I remembered how in summer we would spend weekend afternoons to the left of the driveway, mounding dirt up around the potato shoots, until my cousins and I got bored and would chase each other down to the creek and over the footbridge.

Because I was six when my grandfather died, because I was a grandchild and we have super dysfunctional family dynamics so my family barely talk to each other – let alone talk about what the hell is up with our family – because of all that, I don’t really know what happened in my family. From one of my aunts, I know that my grandfather decided that the best way to manage a large family was to not allow any of his children to get along and be friends – divide and conquer and all that – but I don’t know how he enforced that, if he was physical with them or used threats and fear. I know that one of my grandmother’s key phrases was You made your own bed, now lie in it and that she refused to help any of her children if they were in trouble, and wouldn’t let them help each other, but I don’t know if that’s something she brought into their marriage or something she took on to keep on my grandfather’s good side.

It took me a lot of years to get my head around how much I loved my grandparents in that house on Tiraumea Road and how much it felt like home, with how much my grandparents managed to raise their kids to be such messes who don’t know how to interact with one another, how that created lingering hurts and grudges, how that meant that when my grandmother died my mother refused to tell any of her siblings the details of where or when the funeral would be, because she didn’t want them to there, because that way she would win and would be the best daughter. How all those hurts and fucked up ways of dealing with things flowed through into how at least some of us grandchildren were raised.

The first psychologist I saw as an adult, one session she got me to role play being my mother. We were less than five minutes into the role play when I realised that I could never be good enough for my mother to love because she’d never been good enough for my grandfather. My grandfather considered girls to be a bit of a waste – of time, of money, of education – and the only thing they were good for was growing up and getting married and having babies. He had six daughters.

During late summers at Tiraumea Road, while I sat in the cool of the house or the porch, eating and playing, my mother would walk across the footbridge with my grandfather and head to the massive pile of cut-up logs near the back of his workshop, and together they’d cut them down to firewood size with a chainsaw and an axe. When she’d come back to the house, my mother’s face and arms would be covered in a dirty sheen and she’d be smiling in a way that I don’t remember ever seeing at any other time. For those couple of hours, when it was just her and my grandfather, outside, sweating, chopping wood, she had a chance of showing him that she wasn’t a waste. Maybe if she could chop enough wood, then maybe he would love her.

There was another photo taken that summer day when I was six, which I don’t have. My grandfather took it, with his camera that he kept safe in a brown leather case, the brown leather case held across his body with a strap. I posed in front of one of the tōtara logs, a small Vitruvian girl, star-fished across the width of the trunk’s rings. I remember posing for the photo, but I don’t remember ever seeing it. I don’t know if that film was ever developed.

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’
Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor
Keep going!
Sunday-Essay-Kyle-Boonzaier-Feature-Image.jpg

The Sunday EssayAugust 7, 2022

The Sunday Essay: 27 Teeth

Sunday-Essay-Kyle-Boonzaier-Feature-Image.jpg

Some people grow too many teeth. Jackie Lee Morrison grew 27 too many.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand

Original illustration by Kyle Boonzaier.


I was born more teeth than girl.

I was 11 months old when my mother took me to the orthodontist for the first time. She carried me in her arms, the dental students giggling and pointing.

“She doesn’t have any teeth yet,” they said.

I didn’t, but my parents had noticed that I was doing something odd, pushing my lower jaw forward and gurning. The orthodontist who saw me suggested two routes: break my jaw and reset it or wait until I was older and go through NHS-paid-for braces.

My parents looked at me, the gurgling toothless babe in my mother’s arms, and decided that breaking my jaw was too cruel.

 

It was nine years before I found myself lying in a chair at the children’s orthodontics department at the hospital. I had been pulled out of school especially for the appointment in a large room filled with dental chairs, each separated by flimsy temporary walls, the cartoon stickers on them faded and peeling. I stared at the pock-marked ceiling, counting the dots in each square. It was an exercise I’d repeat monthly for the next few years. 

My orthodontist, Professor Meikle, was a giant of a man with grey hair, bushy eyebrows, and purple-tinged lips, his eyes obscured behind large glasses. I could taste rubber in my mouth as he poked and prodded, cold metal instruments feeling their way around my mouth. He gave me a little white plastic cup of pink liquid, which I swirled around my mouth and spat into the sink – it had a strange almost sweetness to it.

When they led me away for x-rays, Professor Meikle and his assistants put on lead aprons and stepped behind a screen, leaving me exposed in my flimsy school uniform. They told me to bite down on the plastic bit in front of me. There was a humming and loud thunk, and then they led me back to my chair. When the images came back, they were clipped to a light box in front of me and my mother.

Little white shadows in my head, far more than there should’ve been, crowding every available nook and cranny. Professor Meikle held his hands up and the dental assistant removed his gloves for him. He discarded his mask.

His finger landed on the x-ray. “These are Jackie’s permanent teeth.” Another stab. “And these are her extra teeth.”

Extra teeth? I wondered, head turned sideways on the dental chair, neck craning. There was one on the top and one on the bottom, two fuzzy white blobs which shouldn’t have existed.

“Surgery would be best,” he told my mother. “There are too many teeth. We’ll remove some of the baby ones to make room for later, and the two extras. She’ll have to go under.”

Go under? Go under what?

“Later on, we’ll look at braces. But we’ll have to make some room first.”

It’s a strangely intimate relationship, the one between you and your orthodontist. They have access to one of the most disgusting parts of your body, and you just lie there, let them root around in your mouth, and trust that everything will work out. Of course, at my age, I was just a body – a body with too many teeth – so there I lay, being talked over the top of, my mother nodding and making “mhm” and “hmm” noises. It felt like it was my fault that I was born with too many teeth; like I was inconveniencing everyone.

The surgery was booked. Dressed in a hospital gown, I lay on a cold bed under bright, white lights. Four heads hovered above me, only their eyes visible beneath their scrubs and masks.

“Just a little pinch,” said the nurse, as she put the line into my wrist and taped it down. “Count backwards from ten for me.”

I didn’t make it past eight.

“She’ll feel better once she starts walking around,” I heard a voice say, reaching through my dream. “Best to get her up and about.”

“It’s time to get up,” my father said, shaking me. I groggily opened my eyes, blinking. Everything was numb, the world a haze. A small plastic bag with four bloody teeth was thrust in front of me.

“Look, Jackie,” my mother said. “Look at all these teeth they took out of you.”

 

After I’d healed from the surgery, we went back to Professor Meikle. There were still too many teeth. Another two operations were needed but this time just under local anaesthetic. I was to be a guinea pig, to prove that not all children’s surgeries required general anaesthetic. We were a medical family – my father was a doctor at the same hospital.

“We should accommodate and support medical training wherever we can,” he told my mother, signing the consent forms.

This surgeon was thin and lanky. At the first appointment, he took out seven teeth, my mother watching over me. I twitched just once.

At the second appointment, he took me away from my mother and put me on an upright surgical bed, strapped in like a patient at an asylum. I could see everything this time. The needle he used to inject the anaesthetic into my gums was long and large. There was a moment’s pain, pressure, and then a metallic taste in my mouth.

“OK, we’re going to get started,” he said, and drew back a curtain, revealing a crowd of dental students in white coats. They were holding clipboards and staring at my mouth.

He spoke about me like I wasn’t there, addressing the students with the bored tone of a lecturer who had done this a thousand times before. I was the patient with too many teeth, he told them. It would be a simple extraction today. They were lucky to witness this. The students nodded and made notes.

“Come on, don’t be shy,” said the surgeon. “Feel free to come closer and have a look.”

One by one, the students peered into my mouth. I closed my eyes and wondered if this was all some terrible nightmare.

“The key with these sorts of things,” said the surgeon, “is to make the patient feel like they’re part of the procedure.” He turned to face me, clamping a metal tool around one of my top incisors. “OK, Jackie,” he said, his tone falsely cheery. “Would you like to pull out your own tooth?”

“No, thank you,” I tried to say, but my numb mouth and the metal clamp in it were obstructing my speech.

The surgeon smiled, taking my hand and placing it on the clamp. “Here we go – one, two, three.” 

He pulled down on my hand and out came my tooth. It was easier than I’d expected, like unplugging a bath. I stared in horror at the tooth in my grasp. The students applauded.

By the time I was a teenager, I was 13 for 13 – one tooth for every year. My new collection of little bags of teeth were kept in a box. Teeth which my mother scrubbed with a toothbrush and toothpaste in the kitchen sink. After each surgery, the tooth fairy left me a crisp £10 note – I was rolling in teeth money.

Why, I wondered, did I have so many teeth? At every appointment with Professor Meikle, he seemed disappointed – there were too many teeth. My mouth was too small for the number of teeth. We needed to make more room for the teeth. I closed my eyes and saw the x-ray from that first appointment, white shadows all over my head. Why did my body think it needed so many more teeth than the average person?

“Maybe,” a friend said, “you absorbed your twin in the womb and all that’s left of them are the teeth. That happens, sometimes.”

“Don’t be daft,” my mother said. “You just have too many teeth.”

For the next few years, I suffered through braces: rubber bands that pinged off my teeth, sharp metal that cut my lip, wires that stabbed the inside of my cheeks, wax pressed onto the front of the braces which fell off in clumps in my mouth.

Once, my mother stuck a pair of pliers into my mouth, clipping the edges of the wires – it tasted dirty and cold, pressed against the side of my tongue.

“Don’t move, just in case I get you,” she said. 

A metal bridge was fixed to the roof of my mouth, a key supplied which needed to be inserted and given a quarter turn every few nights. It was to make more room for all of the teeth yet to appear, pulling the existing ones apart. I sobbed into my pillow as my mother leaned into my mouth, turning the key millimetre by millimetre.

Headgear came next: a blue elasticated band which wrapped around the back of my head and slotted into two bands attached to my top molars, worn only at night. I slept fitfully, waking every morning with dried drool on my cheeks and pillow.

To add insult to injury, I was prescribed glasses. Now I was a metal-mouth and a four-eyes. I wept and stared at myself in the mirror – truly an ugly duckling. At my all-girls’ school, I was assigned the role of The Handsome Prince in a class play and my classmates laughed hysterically.

One day, Professor Meikle looked in my mouth and said, “I think we’re done.”

It had taken five years, five expensive gift baskets every Christmas, and 23 teeth, but we were at the end of the road. He clipped the braces off, polishing my teeth. I ran my tongue over them – they felt naked, strange and slimy, but my bite was finally perfect.

“Thank you,” I said, shaking his hand. 

He smiled, purple-tinged lips spreading across his face, large teeth grinning. “I hope I don’t see you again.”

As my mother and I got into the elevator she sighed. “I bet he’ll miss those gift baskets.”

 

At 23, my dentist, Mr. Marsden, looked at my x-rays and switched off the overhead lamp, manoeuvring my chair back upright. He’d been my dentist since I was a little girl. I only really knew him by his eyes and slight Northern accent and was always surprised when he pulled down his mask to reveal a beard, a little greyer every year.

“OK, so you see these teeth here?” He pointed at my four wisdom teeth, only two of which had broken through. “You see how the root is curving down like that? They shouldn’t be doing that. I recommend having them taken out.”

I laughed. One last surgery. “Right. Of course.”

He looked at me and pushed his chair back, pulling his mask down. He crossed his arms. “This is going to sound kind of weird,” he said, “but when you have them out… may I have them? I’m doing a study on impacting teeth, you see.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, why not.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it,” he said, grinning. He had nice teeth. I wondered how many he’d had taken out over the years.

The surgery was booked, the surgeon this time a short, jovial man with wild hair. He rubbed his hands together as he talked, no doubt excited by a chance to remove more of my never-ending teeth.

“Just a little pinch,” said the nurse, inserting the line into my wrist. They asked me to count backwards from ten. I counted and waited, but nothing happened. I laughed and said it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Nobody engaged in conversation with me.

“You apparently wouldn’t shut up,” my mother told me afterwards. “They were just waiting for you to go to sleep so they could start. Here, these are yours.” She gave me one final bag of four bloody teeth.

A couple of days later I walked into my dentist’s office, clutching the bag. “Mr. Marsden wanted these,” I told the receptionist.

She held it away from herself between forefinger and thumb. “Oh. Thanks.”

*

Sometimes I wonder if I’m written about in dental journals, a footnote credit as The Girl with Too Many Teeth. I’ve never looked myself up, though I’m sure I’m in there. These days, I forget to tell new dentists about my multiple surgeries, until they ask in confusion if I don’t have as many teeth as I should.

“Oh, right – I’ve had 27 teeth removed,” I say.

“Oh! That’s a lot. But you have such nice teeth.”

I smile, straight pearly whites. “I do now.”

‘If you regularly enjoy The Spinoff, and want it to continue, become a member today.’
Toby Manhire
— Editor-at-large
But wait there's more!