The Rear End

The Moment of Tooth

losing a tooth is a big deal, but losing three...

Mike Paulus |

My kid is loosing all her teeth. Don’t worry, I’m told this is normal. I have memories of loosing my own teeth, how they’d get looser and looser until they were clinging by the thinnest strands of skin. To be honest, it always gave me the heebeegeebees.

People, teeth are weird. When you’re a kid, you have teeth growing underneath your teeth. When you loose a tooth, a new one emerges, like a zombie pushing up out of your gum line to eat your brains breakfast. It’s totally natural, yet totally bizarre, and it’s been happening a lot in my house.

Tooth One

On a Monday afternoon not so long ago, my daughter lost her very first tooth. Then she promptly swallowed it with a mouthful of goldfish crackers. The two front teeth on her bottom row had been loose for weeks, so one of them popping out was no big surprise. Swallowing the tooth? Unexpected.

As my mind turned to thoughts of a human tooth making its disgusting way through a kid-sized digestive track, my wife assured our somewhat distraught daughter that she could write a note to the Tooth Fairy – who would no doubt understand the circumstances. 

So that’s what they did. And in the morning, the Tooth Fairy had left behind a shiny new coin and a personal reply written in very, very small handwriting. Our kid was very, very pleased, and we all rejoiced. Parenting milestone achieved!

Tooth Two

Her next tooth came out later that day. It had gotten looser and looser since that morning, and after school, my wife just squeezed it out. “Wow!” we all said. “Another one!”

I heard about the tooth removal at work. When I got home, I checked out the (now growing) gap in my kid’s bottom row of teeth, gave her a hug, and went about my normal evening routine. It’s during this time that some idiot came across her recently liberated tooth on a napkin and, blindly assuming it was some sort of food-based particle, tossed it into a compost bucket full of coffee grounds and popcorn kernels that happen to look very, very much like little kid teeth. 

Later that evening, once we all realized what had happened, this idiot spent a good 20 minutes kneeling on our driveway, fishing through gross compost with a small garden spade until he found it. To avoid public embarrassment, I will not tell you this idiot’s name. But it rhymes with “Pike Maulus.”

My daughter decided to keep the tooth and maybe let the Tooth Fairy have it at a later date. 

Tooth Three

The next day, I was helping her get ready for school when my daughter mentioned that her tooth was loose. Silly child. She must be mistaken. Perhaps she’s experiencing some sort of phantom tooth sensation in her freshly emptied sockets, I thought.

“Another tooth!?” I feigned, “Show me where!” 

She showed me. And I immediately engaged the time-honored parenting skill of “keeping your crap together so you don’t terrify your kids because their daddy is freaking all kinds of ways out.” Even so, judging by the look on my face, she may as well have just vomited a live chinchilla into my breakfast cereal. 

The tooth immediately to the right of her missing ones was sticking out forward ... at a weird angle ... and kind of bloody. It wasn’t just super loose – the tooth appeared to growing in a whole new spot. She just stood there, smiling and wiggling it, as if a kooky snaggletooth mutation hadn’t overtaken her mouth.  

Was it really that big of a deal? No. Did it really look that bad? No. Am I just a big man-baby who thinks loose teeth are gross? I highly doubt it. But yes.

As my wife later explained, she had probably been grinding her teeth in her sleep and jammed it out a little, thus the weird angle and the blood. In all probability, the odd tooth was not the result of a botched tracking chip insertion during an alien abduction. Whew.

And then our day took a turn for the dramatic. To make a long story short, a doctor ended up pulling the third loose tooth (for safety reasons) while my kid was under general anesthesia for a completely unrelated and far more problematic issue involving a teeny, tiny flake of metal and her eyeball. (This is a whole different tale of mild trauma and parenting, but I assure you, it has a happy ending.) That night, she placed two teeth beneath her pillow.

So. To recap, my oldest child lost her first three teeth in as many days. The first she swallowed, the second was almost composted, and the third was pulled by an anesthesiologist while she slept. At this rate, by the time she loses her last baby tooth, the intensity of the associated story will probably have escalated to a minor terrorist invasion. I’m envisioning a Jack Bauer-esque scenario where a loose baby tooth will be used to defuse a dirty bomb after many whisper-shouted cellphone conversations with the president. And through it all, my brave (though toothless) girl will be there, standing as tall as she can. Which is relatively short because she’s not even six years old.