Enter Pregnant (read hormonal), All-protective Mama Bear

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

This spoken word bit of brilliance reminded me of an "incident" on the bus last week. An elderly lady gets on the bus and begins making goo-goo eyes & words with H then suddenly seems to notice the gap between H's two front teeth. She asks H if she has lost a tooth, to which H has no reply & looks at me with a quizzical, concerned look that says 'please help me understand what I missed, is this woman crazy, of course I haven't lost a tooth what is she talking about?'. I interject and reply with a reassuring smile, "nope, not yet."
The woman chooses to go on, "well what happened to her teeth?!".
My child has tuned out, probably trying to grasp where she went wrong and what she could possibly do to fix this perceived problem she presented this nice woman with. Or she is wondering what in the world has happened to her own teeth since she woke up this morning & looked in a mirror!
Me thinking:
Oh, good job lady. How to be sensitive. Why didn't you just drop it instead of ripping her down off that pedestal you just put her on when you got on the bus.

I say (with another reassuring to my child yet slightly indignant to stranger smile en visage:
"nothing is wrong with her teeth they work perfectly..." My child beams :)
I continue:
"what you are seeing is her own space that her Mama also has, see? Our teeth work great."
The woman considers this and tries to eat her words and make it all kinds of better to which I nod & politely  ignore & chat with H about what we're going to do when we get home.

Frankly, her pointed question surprised me (& I wondered at her sanity). I truly didn't realize this was something that still mattered. 
This "hideous" physical appearance of the gap between the front teeth is known as diastema http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diastema_(dentistry).
It doesn't hurt, it doesn't impede eating, talking, breathing, smiling, personality or any other important function of the mouth.
When I first visited the dentist at age 10 or 11, the dentist & my father were in cahoots to give me "that perfect super model's smile" (word for word) and I underwent long painful process of pushing my front teeth together with horrid torturous mouth appliances. Guess what happened when my expensive torture time was up?
That's right, my teeth protested by once again floating apart :)
Except now I am stuck with extra skin between my teeth which, at times, feels annoying & uncomfortable.
I felt guilt ridden for years of my life for possessing this imperfection and you know what I eventually discovered? IT DOESN'T MATTER IF ONE HAS A DIASTEMA!
Leave the poor child and her own wonderful mouth of working teeth alone.  It ain't broke.
And to the lady on the bus, sure, you are few & far between in our lives but please woman, PLEASE ... think before you speak around little ones.