The Dumbest Thing I've Ever Done (Journal 23)

Prompt: What's the dumbest thing I've ever done?

The dumbest thing I've ever done was motivated by childish optimism.  I was three and a half at the time, and my favorite television show and my favorite character was Wonder Woman.  I watched the show with my dad, curled up on the orange and brown and white plaid couch.  It was 1980, after all.  I even had the underoos, an under shirt and panties set that was made to look like Wonder Woman's costume.  I wore them around the house all the time and pretended that I was Wonder Woman, that glorious Amazon who always swooped in to save the day.  The invisible plane was the easiest to pull off, but I often got in trouble for hitting my little sister with the piece of thick yellow yarn I used as my magic lasso.  At the time, my family and I were living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and we were getting ready to move back to Maine.  My sister was one and a half, and she and I shared a room.  Our parents had taken apart our beds, so that only the box springs and mattresses rested on the floor, on opposite sides of the room.  I was pretending to save the day, as usual, sneaking around piles of cardboard boxes that resembled city skyscrapers to my child's imagination.  As I tracked that vile criminal, always played by my sister, into our bedroom, I was overcome.  I figured that if Wonder Woman could fly, then so could I.  I took a flying leap from one stack of mattresses to the other – all the way across the room in pursuit of the evil-doer.  Instead of catching my arch-nemesis, though, I instead caught the wall – with my face.  As I smacked my face into the wall, I drove my two front teeth straight back against the roof of my mouth.  I was rushed to the dentist, and they were both pulled out.  I was mollified with my favorite snack: grape popsicles, as many as I wanted, per dentist's orders.  What I didn't foresee at the time were the far-reaching consequences that followed me until my new front teeth grew in at the beginning of the third grade.  At every Christmas pageant, whether at school or at the community center or even at church, I was forced for three years to sing “All I Want for Christmas is my Two Front Teeth.”  Every year I threw tantrums to try to get out of it, and every Christmas, my parents told me that having to sing that song was part of the lesson I had to learn: I was a very special girl, but I was certainly no superhero.