Teeth

My son was watching me brush my teeth and copying me like a little chick just out of the egg, brushing more thoroughly and vigorously than ever before because he was doing it with me. He wasn't just out of the egg, he was going to enter kindergarten that fall, but he was in the women's bathroom with me and his older sister because I was camping alone with them and I wasn't about to send him to the men's bathroom alone. He'd just turned 5 the previous week. Seeing him step up his brushing style brought me back to another campground bathroom, 150 miles west in the Adirondacks and 31 years earlier. I, too, had watched a hiker brush her teeth; a woman I never met but just happened to be facing the mirror like me, a woman taking her dental hygiene very seriously. In my ten years on earth, I'd never seen anyone brush so vigorously for so long.

I tried to copy her, and all that day, hiking on the local trails with my mom and dad and little brother, I ran my tongue over my teeth and felt how much smoother and cleaner they felt than usual. It was nice.

I'd been told I had "soft teeth," because I mysteriously got cavities in every single molar during those first ten years. Adult molars barely had a chance to come in before my dentist found cavities in them. When I laughed as a teenager, people would sometimes comment in amazement on the bright silver that flashed throughout my open mouth. I was embarrassed, but I kept on laughing anyway.

My dentist as a kid was a very soft-spoken guy, always ready with a smile for my parents as he ushered me into his office where we could be alone. He was in an older, stately building in downtown Rochester NY, with a faintly musty smell and a classic dentist chair, which in my memory is a pale turquoise with stainless steel trim.

I remember the incredible pain in my jaw as he'd lean into the tools, grinding into my teeth, the Novocaine seemingly not working on me. I'd grip the turquoise chair handles as so many had before me, submitting to agony in what seemed to be an inevitable part of growing up with soft teeth.

Fast forward 25 years. I'd had one child, the daughter, but not the son yet, and I was living on the Atlantic coast, just outside of Boston. "Your teeth aren't soft!" scoffed my new dentist. "They are fine! That doesn't even make sense."

I'd never considered that my teeth might be perfectly normal. I just thought I was somehow strange, defective, and had to hunker down and deal with it. "Who was this person who did this to you?" asked my new dentist. And then eventually, after we replaced the old cracked silver mercury fillings with safe white fillings that no one noticed, he said gently, "I think he was a sadist."

Kids will believe anything. That's the thing about kids. And adults don't always know what to believe. As a parent, I had become a strict enforcer of brushing twice a day, an active maker of dentist appointments for my kids, a finder of delightful dental staff, and was all about x-rays, sealants and careful dental hygiene for them. They haven't had any cavities yet, and maybe they never will.

My son packed away his toothbrush and padded out into the star-filled night. Nothing is hidden when you're camping, it's all in the open. And what it exposes is how much we usually hide.