About hopeful teeth grinding

Once upon a time I kicked the bad habit of teeth grinding.  But now the clench is back.  And with it comes the threat of receding gum lines, ear aches, and the dreaded molded plastic nighttime teeth guard.  Because that’s fun.

The last time I kicked the habit of grinding, it came at the cost of a dentist drilling and filling two holes in my molars.  That experience was enough to teach me to pay attention to jaw muscles bulging like unshelled walnuts chomping away on some stress not even registered by conscious thoughts.  With equally strong resolve, my conscious thoughts must pry open those jaws, force some margin in the stress of life like the plastic cushion of a night guard, and go around like a slack-jawed Nutcracker, nervously avoiding additional injections of Novacaine into innocent gums.

Writing, for me, is a way to slack jaw.  So many thoughts assault me already written, demanding reaction: the news reporters read their teleprompters, my Instagram feed fills with inspirational cheer, I load my Amazon cart with another book on racial reconciliation, my child’s school emails an update on plans for returning to school.  Written content streams at me.  My jaw chomps down on it.  Even in the cushion where I attempt to create margin, like when the children are relatively dedicated to their bedtime routines and I sit down to watch an episode of Parks and Recreation, I am still a passive recipient of words already written, packaged, and demanding my laugh, my thought, my nudge to my husband sitting beside me.

Writing is the only place I can look ahead and find blankness.  There’s this sentence I write here, and at the end of it I will add a period, and then see only white inches on my computer screen, waiting for me and no one else to fill them.

My jaw relaxes a bit.

The first six months of 2020 feel a bit to me like my dentist peering over her mask with eyes slitted in practiced dental-shaming: You’re not flossing, are you?  (Guilty as charged, but to be fair, I did apply some effort starting a week ago when I remembered this appointment was coming up.)  You’re grinding your teeth at night, aren’t you?  (Well, I thought I was asleep so how would I really know, but if you say so…)  You want to have gums around your teeth for the second half of your life, don’t you? (Sure? Um, who wouldn’t?)

2020 is doing a really good job pointing out where I’ve been teeth grinding and have gums receding.  I can poke around and find the spots that have been too packed, busy, and reactive.  2020 has forced margin, allowing me to become bored, restless, anxious about blank calendar days, and realize that I’m being given a very rare gift indeed: inches of white space in which to write my own content.

My jaw relaxes a bit.

The other day, in the calendar blank of having nothing else to do, my girls and I went searching out art in public places downtown.  This adventure required that we ride the subway.  In our mid-sized town, “subway” is a bit of a joke because it consists of about four stops, is free to hop on and off between most junctions, and is so clean rats feel like they must show up, if at all, wearing masks and gloves.

So art-hunting we went, and aside from the train conductor, we saw three other passengers.  These are not normal times.  Even in our not-overly-populated mid-size city.  Traffic has evaporated.  Crowds drained away.  Commuters dissipated.  Rat sightings: zero.

2020 life moves forward, but after the period comes…what?

Even the rhetoric of advertising in 2020 contradicts itself.  

There, on the subway, was a sign urging us to stay home.

Stay home.

Stay safe.

Stay alive.

But on the ceiling of the subway car, just beyond that yellow safety sign, a red sign reads “Transit Advertising Supports Your Business.”

In these jaw-clenching times, we argue against ourselves.  Stay home.  Come ride.  It’s an unshelled walnut-sized conundrum.

No wonder my teeth grinding habit is back.

I’ve been thinking about the word “hope.”  My 2019 understanding of hope was that it was a diving board—“hope” provided some solid surface from which to spring into the uncertainty of air and water.  My 2020 understanding of hope looks more like inches of white space.

Hope is inches of margin begging for new content.  It may not actually spring from a diving board.  Hope, it turns out, becomes more certain the more uncertainty, space, silence, and margin exists.  Hope chomps down on the unshelled walnut-sized conundrums.  As Jo Saxton says, “Hope still wins, but it often has scraped knees because it keeps crawling forward.”

And then there’s this truth about the unlikely origins of hope: “We know that affliction produces endurance,endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” Romans 5:4-5, CSB

If teeth-grinding stress (affliction) ultimately scraps it out to hope, a scraped-knee hope, then I say let hope have some inches of white space to work with.

I wonder again about the subway rats.  Given this new definition of hope, I find myself cheering them on to mask-up, crawl forward, and dare to hope to find whatever it is rats most like to chomp down on in those miles of tunnels.