On Dentistry and Parenting
A month or so before I left home to attend NYU, I had a routine check-up at the dentist. I was still at an age where my mom made my dentist appointments so, like a good boy, I went every six months. On this particular occasion, as I was getting ready to leave, the dentist said to me, “it looks like you’ve got a wisdom tooth coming in. Next time you’re here we should take that out.” I really focused on “the next time you’re here” part of that sentence and avoided going back to the dentist for fifteen years.
To put that into a historical context, George Herbert Walker Bush was entering the final few months of his presidency in the summer of ‘92. His son, George W. Bush was lamely quacking his way through the last year of his second term in office when I next visited a dentist. Before you judge me too harshly, I should tell you that I have never had a cavity. Despite my best efforts, these teeth are in surprisingly good shape.
It wasn’t just the prospect of having a wisdom tooth yanked out of my head that kept me away for so long. I genuinely hate going to the dentist. The scraping, the drilling, the pooling of saliva, the iris scorching interrogation lamp, the feeling of latex gloves crammed between gums, the screeching of whatever that medieval razor-sharp hook is called; it’s all too much for me. I’ve always believed that future generations will look back at 20th and 21st Century dentistry the way we view 19th century surgery. In the future, there will be a show like The Knick about a New York City dental practice in 2016. Can’t somebody, anybody, invent some new dental equipment that doesn’t make all that goddamned noise? Come on Silicon Valley; stop disrupting ride sharing and food delivery and get on to some tooth-care disrupting.
My then girlfriend (now wife) insisted I get back to see a dentist in 2007. I’m sure she wanted my mouth to join us both in the new millennium. “Fair enough”, I thought. The wisdom tooth had caused me no issues in the decade and a half since it had been spotted. So why not spend some much needed time in the reclining chair of horrors? I remember walking into the office and noticing that Kenny G was playing on the radio. I sent Jen a text, “They actually play Kenny G in dentist’s office?” It was a revelation wrapped in a cliche, heavy-handedly stuffed into a bad joke. Sadly, this was the highlight of the experience. That sadistic bastard scraped most of the 1990's away from my teeth. There was grime on them that remembered Ross Perot. He told me I needed to come back. And soon.
If history has taught us anything, it’s that telling me to come back to a dentist soon is a frightfully ineffective way of getting me to come back to a dentist soon. I am almost too embarrassed to tell you that seven years transpired before my next dental visit. Barack Obama was now in the middle of his second term. We had relocated to Toronto, Canada (no disrespect to President Obama). We had a four-year-old daughter and a son on the way.
Becoming a parent has been the most profound experience of my life. I have, at times, found myself overwhelmed by exuberance. Beaming with pride about accomplishments that would have seemed incredibly banal to me not that long ago (“Did you see that? He just rolled over?”). But mainly, parenting young children is extraordinarily difficult. It requires boatloads of patience and empathy. You try being patient and empathetic to a five-year-old girl who has just spent forty minutes screaming because she wanted the “blue one” (it’s not important…). She has a unique set of challenges that conceptually prompt a sensitive, empathetic response from me. When, despite these challenges, she rises to, or above, the occasion and manages to surprise us with her abilities, it immediately reduces me to tears. But when those challenges are causing her to lash out, it’s much harder to find that place of empathy.
Mornings are particularly difficult. Getting everybody up and dressed, washed, fed and out the door on time takes a herculean effort. Part of what I love about parenting is working in tandem with my wife. We are a good team most of the time. Most mornings begin way earlier than I’d like them to. It’s not uncommon around here for the day to start before 6:00 am. Sometimes I awake to the sight of my daughter standing over me, willing me to get up and out of bed. It’s a terrifying way to start the day. Especially when coupled with the next few moments which usually involve assisting with some urine/fecal situation. How did I get here? Younger me imagined older me would be touring the world, sleeping atop a pile of gold and platinum records. I recognize that that was just fantasy, but my reality involves summoning instant selflessness whilst wading in human excrement because I love this kid that fucking much. This morning, she woke me up at 5:45 to tell me that she’d been to the bathroom without waking me up. If you’ve got a kid, you live this reality too. There is nothing unique about my scenario.
I’ve mentioned patience, empathy and selflessness; the holy trinity of parenting. I feel like I’ve got an infinite amount of love to give when it comes to my children. The moment they were born, the love I felt for both of them was shocking. However, it was a feeling I was somewhat prepared for. My desire to have children was directly linked to my desire to experience love at its deepest, most primal level. But patience? Empathy? Selflessness? These are not renewable resources for me. Truly putting the interests of another person before your own is a difficult thing to do. We are a self-absorbed species. And while one can argue that the success of the human race is tied to our ability to cooperate with one another (and this book makes that argument very well), it is still our nature to be primarily concerned with our own survival. A friend and I had hatched a plan to get a few hours away last weekend so that we could go see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That plan got skunked due to his daughter being sick. Yet somehow, on Sunday, we both found ourselves at the very movie theatre that we’d planned to watch Star Wars, accompanying our daughters to a showing of Alvin & The Chipmunks: Road Chip. Patience. Empathy. Selflessness.
Our neighborhood here in Toronto has a popular family dental practice. The office has a sleek, modern feel accentuated by clean white walls, naturally stained wood beams and large, hi-definition TV monitors. Depending on the patient, the monitors either show animated movies or expensive looking videos featuring aerial shots of the world’s most famous cathedrals. I have had four appointments there in sixteen months. The first three were profanely uncomfortable. There was the usual physical discomfort associated with having somebody scraping sharpened objects mere millimeters from sensitive nerve endings. But there was also the emotional discomfort of being judged severely for what can only be described as a total lack of respect for the dental profession. During an appointment last winter, I sat nervously in the chair as the hygienist aggressively removed plaque from the back of my front teeth while the sounds of the season were being pumped through the office-wide audio system. Some saccharine singer was crooning, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”. I believe that’s the very definition of cognitive dissonance.
On this last appointment, however, I had just dropped my daughter off at school. That morning had been even more hectic than usual. We were up a few minutes after five o’clock, following a night of numerous sleep interruptions. Between the baby and the five-year-old, it seemed I’d barely slept. There was a non-specific, garden variety meltdown, replete with kicking and screaming and all the other accouterment we’ve come to expect. Followed by an early December refusal to don winter outerwear. By the time I arrived at the dentist I was exhausted. I lay back in the chair, my guard up, anxiously awaiting for modern dentistry to reign down its torturous ways on my mouth. But then it happened. I was reclining in a comfortable chair. Eyes closed, soft music playing, nobody screaming at me or needing anything from me whatsoever. I drifted off in to that nether region between “resting my eyes” and deep sleep. It was glorious. I managed to wrestle an uninterrupted forty-five-minute nap out of a dental appointment. That woman could have removed my wisdom tooth, a couple of molars, maybe a lower K9 or three. I never wanted it to end.
The secret, it seems, to regular dental visits is not the nagging and prodding of a dental professional. Rather, one needs to be actively raising a couple of young children. I’m no dentist, but I recommend brushing twice a day, flossing regularly and waking an hour or two before you’re ready, so that you may wipe the butt of a young child while he/she screams at you.
