My daughter points out, correctly, that peers make fun of whatever a child is self-conscious about, whether it is even true or not. Take a child with perfectly normal ears, who thinks they are big, and his classmates are going to call him Dumbo simply because they know it bothers him. They don't even think he has big ears. They only know it gets under his skin.

My experience bears this out. I was over-the-moon happy to get braces on my teeth at age 13, because I had needed them badly ever since my adult teeth came in. The overbite was extreme to the point of downright facial deformity. I remember, if I were to touch my bottom teeth with the tip of my thumb, the top teeth extended out all the way to the knuckle. It was difficult for me to chew with my mouth closed. "Bugs Bunny" and "Bucky Beaver" had been far more hurtful than any "Metal Mouth" or "Tin Grin" I ever heard, and you know what? I don't remember hearing very much of it. There were maybe a couple of wisecracks at first about my braces, but it didn't last, whereas the razzing about my bucked teeth had been going on for years. Maybe this is because I was so glad to have the braces that I didn't care what anybody said.

There are a lot of parallels with my braces and my glasses. I didn't get my first pair of glasses until I was 14. I know I needed them as early as age 5, but my parents hadn't believed me. They assumed I was only trying to get attention when I told them I couldn't see. I specifically recall my father reacting with a sarcastic, "Yeah, sure," and then ignoring it. It took a note home from school to convince them otherwise, similar to the way I never would have had braces if a school counselor hadn't financed them. Just like my braces, I was overjoyed to have my glasses. And just as with "Metal Mouth," I heard "Four Eyes" maybe one or two times, and then it stopped.

I had been made fun of for so many other things, yet I was not laughed at because of my braces or my glasses. Why? I doubt it was because my classmates had outgrown that kind of behavior by the time I had braces and glasses. As evidence, I continued to hear jokes made about my last name that sounded like a body part, my first name that sounded like an animal, my clothing that was outdated, ill-fitting, in bad repair, and screamed "poverty," and my plus-size body type. Those things did bother me. Could it really be, that the only reason I was teased about the other things, but not about the braces or the glasses, was because having braces and glasses didn't bother me but actually made me happy?