Mind the Gap and the gaps in my mind.

What flossing my teeth this morning just seems to have teased from my mind about feeling othered.

How often do you floss your teeth? Daily or weekly or not at all? Weird question I guess but poor gum health is linked to all kinds of big and menacing conditions like diabetes and heart disease and I know all this and yet still ..

It’s not a daily thing here. But this morning I actually did and pulled not just a thread between my tired teeth but also fleeting thoughts from my busy, cluttered mind at the same time. As you’ll see if you read on.

Even Bita, my fastidious dentist friend, recently confessed to not doing it as often as she thinks / knows she ought to. And she’s a stickler with much higher periodontal standards than my own.

The sensation of minding the gap - or lack of it? - between my molars, although I don’t do it daily I do actually like how it feels to floss. Or rather, I like not the during part but the after bit. Stepping away afterwards feeling refreshed and expanded by the experience, like I can almost sense the extra space it’s created within not just my actual mouth but also within my mind. Mouth cleaned, mind cleaned.

The during part is often painful and bloody and involves a magnifying mirror which, at fifty three, is certainly a confronting experience. Today though was another level discomfort.

Who. Are. You? I wanted to ask the face that stared back at me from the round and spattered - I know, ugh - glass this morning. And with sleep in her eyes and yesterday’s gardening grime still caked around her nose stud, I noticed, plus a stray granola chunk wedged around in against the enamelled arch of one of her incisors.

I wiped the mirror. This Pendleton poncho also brings great pattern joy and good nostalgia

And also those grey eyebrow hairs. Where did? What the actual?

I noticed I was feeling othered by my own reflection. Apart from myself. A big, gaping chasm appearing in the shiny mirrored surface between the brutal reality of x 10 magnification of face and the person my mind believes me to be.

Whilst tussling ham-fisted with the thin, silky, white thread - what is that stuff? Magician’s handkerchief silk perhaps? I realise I don’t even know which is remiss - and tugging it gently through, a lot of thoughts were also sliding through my mind. And quickly. Uncomfortably fast-paced thoughts for the time of day and also counter to the creaky rhythm my actual body seems able to move at. Thoughts about being distanced, outside of something and apart from.

My brain went skidding back through a tunnel of time and performed an unrequested, jolty audit stretching back over the long, messy line of my lifetime.

And all these mental memories of feeling different and feeling alonement were coming up. By mental, I obviously mean I was seeing them in my mind’s eye not that they were batty.

Cue idea. How about, I reasoned, before tackling the day’s photography work - I’ve a wedding from last weekend to treat and edit, shortlist and crop, lots of clean flossed teeth in wide smiles topically - I’d set a timer on my phone and have a go at writing down these past moments which were all slipping through unannounced at the bathroom mirror.

I would grasp at them and try to put them down on to the page here very, very quickly as a morning exercise. And before my brain jettisons the entire tenuous thread of thought.

So here goes …

1. Cartwheels

Aged four in our neighbour’s garden and on a hot summer day like this current scorcher, hanging with the older kids from the street. I don’t recall how much older they were, perhaps by three or four years only which would make them seven or eight. One girl was called Samantha and all the girls except for me were turning cartwheels in the air. I couldn’t cartwheel and I was sad about it. There’s a sun-soaked, orange memory of shame and downcast eyes, me staring crestfallen at bleached white summer lawn, dizzying sunlight streaking across silhouetted girl legs turning circles in front of me.

I was not in the cartwheel crew and there is no photograph of this event. It is, I think, my very first awareness of feeling othered.

This is a memory of not belonging.

2. Gavel

Sat around a gleaming, giant and polished table in a military dining room, heavily pregnant and ravenous in that way you get when your stomach isn’t your own. Poised. Waiting. After enduring several sober and uncomfortable standing hours of cocktail(less) chat, now impatiently waiting to eat the meal we’d come for.

A meal that was in fact right there on a plate and steaming in front of me on the shiny table, but for some, weird and archaic ceremonial reason I wasn’t ‘quite’ allowed to eat.

Because, the gavel.

I didn’t know about this ritual and the wait was excruciating. Probably only minutes but, you know, lonnnnnng hungry and annoying pregnant minutes.

And so my impulse control got the better of me and I picked up my knife and fork and, well, I started regardless.

This is a memory of being not quite the right kind of wife.

Back when she wasn’t in the cartwheel crew

3. Flipped out

Standing in line at a trampoline centre with a squirming gaggle of my own and others’ children plus dozens more behind us in the queue. And despite copious explaining about his robustness and bounceability, being turned away and refused entry, supposedly because of a bit of extra genetic material.

This is a memory of being not the right kind of family.

4. Tischtennis

Perched on a bare concrete bench , now cooler in the darkness but still holding some of the baked in heat of day. Under a tin roof with stars dotting the open skies behind our shoulders, browned legs swinging in Terry towelling shorts around the ping pong tables of ‘le camping’.

Cicadas screaming noisily above all the teen chatter in tongues I mostly didn’t understand. A silver Hitachi ghetto-blaster blaring Sam Fox in stereo out beyond the pines.

All flirtations en français, German garbling and dialoguing in Dutch and my nervous eyes darting between mouths trying to decode the magic and mystery that’s weaving an easy and casual connection in words.

The German kids spilling French words freely like strings of those sweets that sold on long strips in the 80’s. The Dutch dropping whole, entire, beautifully spoken and grammatically correct sentences of English and the French also bavarding between.

I was a kid and yet didn’t speak any of these languages whereas they all comfortably spoke plenty of mine. This felt confusing. How did they get so many of my words in their mouths and yet my mouth was mute to theirs?

This is a memory of feeling an outsider and also a bit thick and also cross about being English.

I’m feeling pleased as I tap these words on the keys of my dirty QWERTY keyboard. Really pleased.

Not only because I flossed my teeth this morning though that is definitely a hygiene win (flashing you a not Hollywood beaming smile with blinding bright sparkle here).

But also, I’m happy that my brain has remembered all this stuff, albeit involuntarily. That I was graced with the chance to reflect at the mirror and then set the timer to put these words to the page because, in doing so, I’m noticing a few things.

Her in the mirror with the greying eyebrow hairs, she went on to learn how to cartwheel. To cartwheel without hands even. And backflip and somersault too¹. And could, if so inclined - and perhaps with Deepl open in a parallel browser window - write all of these sentences out in either French or in German too because she went on to study and learn to speak both fluently. And communicate in Makaton and ASL for a time too.

She also grew into her own voice and learnt to speak up for someone who can’t. And to reject archaic and crappy old rituals when necessary.

I need to divert my attentions into my paid work now, but before I go I’ll tell you that the perceived gaps in each of these observations - whether in ability, behaviour or expectations - they’ve all reminded me that gaps are bloody important to mind. We need to lean in to our gaps. Between the teeth and the thoughts. They all require our regular attention.

And the gaps exposed here, all of them, they led to big and lovely and wonderful things.

Where does your mind go to during the morning routine at the mirror? Do you revolt against your reflection sometimes too? I am often focused on getting out the door and let these thoughts vaporise. Today though was different.

1. of course I can’t no, not NOW, not at 53! What I wouldn’t give though to experience those kind of physical thrills and exhilarations again a few more times.