Originally published in the Tri-Town Transcript, May 3, 2019
By Esther C. Baird
I’ve made many mistakes as a parent. For example, I thought if we installed hooks in the bathroom, I wouldn’t find towels all over the bathroom floor. My mistake, live and learn. But some mistakes you have to live with a little bit longer than you expected. In a word, orthodontics.
Regular Reader, if you are a parent of younger, pre-braces, children, listen carefully. Do not allow your children to enter the colorful, rubber-band laden, halls of orthodontics at the same time.
Do you want even a shred of a life? Do you ever want to send your kids to school for the full day? Do you hope to actually work without interruption, or meet friends for coffee, or run errands, or simply teeter on the edge of sanity? Then you must space your children apart in this area of their lives.
If I have a free moment in any given week you can bet it will be spent at the orthodontist. Why? Because we signed up both girls at the same time. Two kids. Two different school schedules. Two different mouths with specialized needs. So, so, sooooo special.
Here is what no one tells you — every single orthodontist appointment, besides being utterly inconvenient to your schedule, will also result in something akin to the actual end of the world once you get home.
Wires will stab into cheeks. Expanders will reach into your child’s very soul. Brackets will break. Rubber-bands will inexplicably turn into tiny gremlins and attack all night long. Food will get stuck and require you to take out a small loan to buy the right sort of toothbrush and all of this is happening to tween and teenagers! Is there a more explosive combination? I think not.
There is not room in this column to talk about the lip bump device or the night guards our girls must wear. I actually can not type one further sentence about those two items. My pulse has quickened and I need a cocktail… and I’m writing this at 6:24 a.m.
Our youngest had a pallet expander put in a month ago. Actually it was the frame for it, just the wire and back molar anchors. The anchors poked and were uncomfortable and even though we went back to get it adjusted, it still caused her pain and, possibly, a snap with reality.
Or maybe that was me, I can’t be sure.
Here’s what I can be sure about: it’s not a parenting high when you find yourself at a fast food restaurant, somewhere off the Mass Pike, in a parking lot, with your sixth grade child lying across the back seat of the car, a flashlight in one hand while your other hand is deep in her mouth trying to move a rubber-band the size of a molecule off of something as sharp as a knife.
“Ouch, that wire keeps stabbing my finger! Stop biting me!” I snapped at her.
“Dats wah mah chic an tog fil lak AWW DA TAM!! Mah tog is leedig!” My daughter protested from her prone position.
By way of translation, she was not telling me how much she loved me and appreciated the way in which I cared for her. She was telling me that she was 30 seconds from going nuclear if I didn’t fix things.
“I see that you are bleeding, but this is impossible. I’m going to yank it out!” I replied, wondering if there were security cameras in the parking lot.
And then with one foot braced on the wheel well, and the other still in the Mass Pike parking lot, I yanked the wire. It just had to slide out of the anchor. But alas, whereas braces break with the smallest puff of wind at some times, at other times they adhere to the teeth with an unbreakable binding force that should baffle physicists everywhere.
I briefly contemplated using the penknife that I keep handy. But a miraculous dose of reality allowed me to recognize that cutting a metal wire in my daughter’s mouth with a penknife was bordering on a hysterical reaction.
But that’s what orthodontics do. They make you hysterical. And for all that, you get to pay thousands of dollars. I’m not sure if there is a more insane way to spend money, though I hear that drivers ed school could be a close second. So there it is. Some day our girl’s teeth will be straight and fabulous while I’ll have ground mine down to a dusty pulp.
And I’m pretty sure I’ll still find towels on the bathroom floor.