*AN ADMISSION

I'll admit it.  I sucked my thumb when I was a kid.  Well, to be more truthful, I sucked my thumb until I was about thirteen.  My thumb sucking habit was a source of constant frustration and, sometimes, embarrassment for my mother.  She went to great lengths to try and get me to quit the habit.

My thumb sucking habit involved sticking my right thumb all the way in my mouth and while rubbing my pointer finger in a circle around the end of my nose.  I guess as a VERY small child this was kind of cute.  But when I did it in public when I was older,  my mother was mortified. Of course, she was also concerned that I'd end up with buck teeth and require expensive orthodontic work.

My mother tried many different methods to get me to quit. None of them really worked and one method had an unexpected disastrous result.  When I was about eight or nine, I was chosen as my age group representative from my local school playground for the county wide Playground Queen contest.  On the night of the big event when the county wide queen would be picked, my mother dressed me up in my favorite dress...a lavender dotted-Swiss dress with a tiered skirt.  On our way out the door, my mother realized that she hadn't put any of a thumb sucking deterrent liquid on my right thumb.  She didn't want me to be sucking my thumb while I was on the stage during the judging.  Without turning on the hall light, she grabbed a small bottle out of the linen closet and swabbed the stuff on my thumb, spilling some on my dress in the process. .

It wasn't until after we had arrived at the competition that my mother realized that what she had put on my thumb wasn't the liquid deterrent.  The front of my dress where the some of the liquid had spilled and my thumb were stained brown.  She didn't know what she had put on my thumb. But the dress was ruined and it took awhile for my thumb to return to it's normal color. To add insult to injury, I lost the contest too.

The lavender, Swiss-dot dress before it was ruined.

I eventually quit sucking my thumb on my own.  I don't remember exactly how old I was when I stopped.  But I do know that when I went to high school,  the thumb sucking habit was long gone. I never required braces either.