Something to get your teeth into
I’ve broken my teeth. For the second time.
The first was when I was 14, on Dave Doubtfire’s knee.
Dave Doubtfire was the consistency and size of a concrete bridge support. He had a reputation on the rugby field of never being brought down by anyone. I had a reputation for never letting anyone through Ñ until I met his knee.
He made the try, but they had to dig my incisor out his kneecap.
The second was yesterday, on a mango stone. Actually, I say ‘my teeth’, but strictly speaking this second time it’s not my teeth; it’s the denture that replaced my teeth after Dave Doubtfire had run through them.
This time I scraped my teeth lightly across the mango stone and they snapped, as quietly as if Peter Rabbit had run through them.
Note that I said ‘them’. My denture now replaces four teeth. Dave Doubtfire broke only one, but over the following three years I lost three more. At the time the dentist said it was trauma resulting from having a knee in my mouth.
This time the dentist said a new denture is going to cost me $600. That’s what I call trauma. Everything in my mouth should have dissolved Ñ incisors, canines, molars, tongue …
But it’s my own fault. I could have saved those three by regular brushing; but I never did, despite the admonitions of my parents.
It’s amazing the lengths children (yes, I know, I was 15, but I was a slow learner) will go to, to avoid brushing their teeth: smearing the toothbrush with toothpaste, washing toothpaste straight from the tube around their mouths, spending an extra 10 minutes in the bathroom with the tap running.
It would have been so much easier just to clean the bloody things. Properly, with a brush! And I might have saved at least three of my teeth, too.
My mother used to call it making hard work of being lazy.
The result now of all that adolescent hard work is that I have a mouth so full of metal that when I fall into water I sink headfirst. Oh, if only I’d listened!
The issue of cleaning your teeth must be one of the few arenas in child-parent relationships in which parents can retain their smug “I-told-you-so” righteousness.
They’ve lost the moral high ground on lying Ñ we all know adults lie. They’ve lost the moral high ground on drinking Ñ we’ve all seen pissed parents at barbecues; they’ve lost the moral high ground on financial management Ñ it’s parents, mostly, who have created this current global crisis.
But on the issue of cleaning your teeth, they’re right. Never mind that they didn’t clean theirs when they were kids Ñ if you don’t clean yours, bad things will happen.
I’m the living proof. I must wait two weeks for my new denture. Meanwhile my broken one works, after a fashion. The actual teeth part of it is hanging precariously in position, and so long as I don’t eat, smile, engage in public speaking, sneeze, or run into Dave Doubtfire again, everything will be okay.