Oral Hygiene: It Never Ends

My kids have cavities and it hurts my feelings.

(Quick note: If you enjoy this post, please feel free to ♥️ it! Every ♥️ makes a child’s teeth sparkle!)

It’s hard to stay sane/feel good with all the plagues of Egypt simultaneously befalling us. No one wants to turn a blind eye to the frogs and the blood rivers, but obsessing over your boils ain’t gonna cure ‘em! One constructive coping mechanism floated to survive these trying times is to focus on what you can control. Tend to your own garden. Don Draper famously ruined Penn Station by asserting, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.” So instead of hyperventilating about how “RFK Jr. is going to bring back polio!” which I cannot prevent (there being only one of me, which is several me’s short of the herd needed to achieve herd immunity), maybe I should be talking about what I CAN DO. I CAN help my children cultivate rich inner lives, so that when they and all their friends can no longer walk because they’ve been ravaged by polio, they’ll have a wonderland in their minds to escape to. The only problem with this otherwise sound advice of “starting small” is that in order for these humble acts of defiance to fortify the defier, one has to do them well. One has to “not kill” the garden they’re tending to, or actually “control” the things one can control. If you bite off only what you can chew but choke on it anyway, you’re still gonna need the heimlich, and that leaves everybody sore.

Case in point: to me, oral hygiene is personal. We’re all on our own journeys. I know that if I don’t floss at least once a day, my breath smells like roadkill. But some people don’t floss at all, and are apparently not disgusted enough with themselves to fake their own deaths and start life over as someone new, like say, a person who DOES floss. In college, I had a friend so revolted by the body horror of the tooth-cleaning process, she could only stand to do it at night. I found this choice histrionic and self-sabotaging. And yet, I respected it. My husband eats candy in bed. AFTER brushing his teeth. This self-inflicted violence leaves me speechless, but… his body, his business. Overall, I think my hands-off approach to other people’s teeth has served my relationships well, with two crucial exceptions: my relationships with my children.

Members of a strange alien race.

The experience of being a parent is a rude crash course in discovering that most things you thought were basic human instincts have to be taught. Eating. Sleeping. Shitting. And yes, also brushing your teeth. But when your children are young (and mine have only ever been) the firehose of fundamental skills that kids need to acquire is so overwhelming and the resistance is often so strong, you start operating on a Maslow’s-heirarchy-of-needs-to-teach basis. That hierarchy is different for every parent. For example, when my younger son was an infant, he would sometimes go a week without pooping. With each passing day, he’d become increasingly irritable, his sleep would worsen, his stomach would tighten. Just think how you’d feel if you went seven days without taking a shit! As a result my husband and I now prioritize hydration. Our children always have a sippy cup in one hand, and are usually committing some act of violence with the other. But to get them to actually drink, we have to cut the water they sippy with apple juice. Harmless enough, until they’re pounding ten cups a day. (It’s a rare night when one of their night diapers doesn’t flood the sheets.) Similarly, it’s important to me that my children eat some kind of vegetable with their dinner. To get them to do so usually involves the promise of ice cream, a lollipop, or some other sugary treat that will immediately undo the health benefits achieved by the vegetable that got them there. This constant back-and-forth with two very petulant negotiators can break a (wo)man. By the time I’m fighting to get little teeth brushed at the end of the night, I feel like a POW. Beaten down. Numb. Unmoved by my co-habitants’ screams. Preferring them, actually, because and least then they’ll keep their fucking mouths open. A night’s sleep never feels restorative enough. So my husband and I have resorted to the practice I witnessed that so disgusted me in college: we only brush their teeth once a day.

I knew we were living on borrowed time. The calls from the dentist’s office came, but I ignored them. First my children were weeks, then months, then more than a year overdue for a checkup. When I finally scheduled the appointment (because the dentist called me) I refused to be the one to take them. I hot potato-ed the chore off on my husband, kissing him goodbye on the morning of their doomed cleaning like he was a soldier heading off to war, then I braced myself for the worst. An hour and a half later, they returned, and the look in my husband’s eyes told the story before his mouth had a chance. Five cavities in all, two for the younger, three for the elder. But the gut-wrenching part was what my five-year-old screamed at my husband when the dentist informed him of his fate. “This is your fault! You never brush my teeth in the morning!” As my husband recapped the events in our living room, my son — now playing with the tiny bucket of slime the dentist gave him (maybe to punish us?) — chimed in, “It’s true. It’s your fault.” What could I say? He was right, and it hurt my feelings.

I got pregnant with my second kid during the darkest days of the pandemic. Before we started trying, I asked my husband if he thought it was a bad idea to bring another child into the world as it was becoming an increasingly terrible place to live. His rejection of this concern comforted me, though perhaps it will seem too simple to you. The world is always terrible, and people still have kids. People are having babies in Syria, in Palestine, because creating life is part of the human condition. You can’t wait around to do it til the world stops being terrible, because it always will be. That’s why we have kids, to make it less so. (I may have taken some liberties with the paraphrasing.) During this dark moment in history, I feel grateful to have children, as both a distraction from and a worthy focus toward the struggle to bring back the light. Even as I fail them, they give me a place to put my fight. Getting them to brush their teeth twice a day is my next small act of revolution.