THAT GOETTSCH JAW

Before I could introduce my husband Tim to my father’s sister, he took one look at the woman and said she must be Aunt Gilda.  My jaw dropped.  How could he possibly know?  When I suggested he must have heard someone call her by name, Tim said simply, “She had to be a Goettsch.  All the Goettschs have the same jaw.”  The jaw in question dropped further.  What?  Tim shrugged, as if I’d surely noticed.  “That square Goettsch jaw.  You can’t miss it.”

Since his comment, I’ve become rather obsessed with the jaws in my family – comparing, contrasting - and wondering if all those jaws that look like mine, hurt like mine.

My siblings and I - for jaw comparison

With the culmination of the chaos that has been my life the last couple of years came a diagnosis – TMJ or temporomandibular joint disorder.  The jaw clenches or the teeth grind in reaction to stress.  While I’d been living with a couple of years of extreme stress, I suspect that I was aggravating my jaw even before the experiences of recent months.  I was always the typical eldest child – wanting to be in charge, taking on responsibility, striving for perfection in an imperfect world.  I had to excel or die trying.

If you’ve never experienced TMJ, in a word, it’s painful – brutally so.  Suddenly, your jaw feels like it’s made of lead.  Rather than a natural extension of your face, the jaw is heavy, moving awkward and painfully.

Since the diagnosis, I have seen a dentist, physical therapist, ENT, oral surgeon, and acupuncturist (not my best decision – ouch!)  After using drugs and exercises to alleviate the pain with limited success, the oral surgeon finally said that I needed to get control of the anxiety that was plaguing my brain and manifesting itself in my jaw.  I needed to find a way to master tension, rather than becoming slave to it.  With that in mind, I’ve started seeing a counselor.  I’ve never done this before.  I didn’t know where to begin and even after several sessions, I never quite know how to talk to her.  So far, it’s a lot of confirmation, “Geez.  You deserve to be stressed after all you’ve been through.”

Duh.  OK.  But now what?

She likes to remind me to “let go” of things that threaten to unnerve me.  Like Richard Carlson prompts:  “Don’t sweat the small stuff because it’s all small stuff.”  Intellectually, I know that; I’ve always known that.  But, like so many things, it’s easier said than done.  For me, it’s an ongoing battle I rarely win.

In hindsight, there are so many things I should have let go of before they became punctuated by stress and I lost sleep to them – grades, relationships, jobs.  Why is hindsight always 20/20 and the here and now 30/60?

Anxiety that I couldn’t talk myself out of or was too young to understand the needlessness of has taken its toll.  My health (most specially my jaw) is paying the price.  Some day, I will have to have surgery, but for now it means no more sub sandwiches or quarter pound burgers; I can’t get my mouth around them.  More importantly, however, when anxiety threatens, it’s a painful reminder to “let things go.”