I was way too cool to wear a retainer when I got my braces off decades ago as a young teenager. I would wear it at night at first but slowly that too became a burden somehow and I ended up ditching it completely somewhere along the way.
I would love to go back to teenage me and beg myself to wear the retainer. I would also like to tell teenage me to lay off the tanning beds and probably a dozen other pieces of advice. Not that I would have listened.
My teeth didn’t shift back to their original God-given alignment immediately. Which is probably why wearing a retainer can seem misleading. You take a couple of days off and don’t notice anything. So you think, what’s the point? The point is slowly but surely, they do start shifting back. Or at least they did for me.
I did get lucky, however. I have a built-in retainer behind my bottom front teeth that somehow has never broken. Don’t ask me how because most people I know had it snap right off the first time they bit into an apple after getting their braces removed. Despite being a pain when I floss, I am grateful for it because my bottom teeth are almost as straight as they were the day I got my braces off. Almost.
Yet those front teeth; though they never shifted totally back, they did slightly. I don’t have any actual resource confirming this to be true but I swear my teeth ended up shifting more after pregnancy. Although the shift was small and I would still say my smile was nice and overall straight, it was enough to bother me. For years.
I finally decided to do something about it besides just complaining or being self-conscious.
I got Invisalign.
While each experience will of course vary, I am going to share my experience over the next six months, the duration of which I will likely be wearing it.
I’ll share an overview of the initial process, the first day, first week, and beyond.
Did you have your teeth straightened as an adult? Did you opt for Invisalign for your kids? Tell us about it in the comments!
Read more of Stephanie’s contributions to AllMomDoes here.
