Opinion: Mom guilt is powerful: What do our kids' teeth say about us as mothers?
Like everywhere in Asheville, our pediatric dentist's office lies down a mountain drive on a curve. And as always, I miss the turn the first time.
Now I sit in a corner chair in a back room, watching my kid. She looks like a hippie from the prairie, wearing a flowered dress and a woven long sweater in every color. Rainbow sandals deck her fanned out feet, marker drawings smear her leg, and a purple nitrous dispenser perches on her nose. The dental assistant is saying, “Open as big as an alligator for me! Okay, bite down.”
As unique as fingerprints and a boon to detectives, our teeth can reveal our age, health, gender and status even long after our deaths. I know this. We all know this. But as the person responsible for this radiant child before me, what I really want to know is, what do our teeth say about our mothers?
A few weeks ago my daughter consulted with a dentist at another practice. "What happened in the last year," the dentist asked, her face stricken with concern, "to cause this much damage?”
My mind raced. What had happened? Our beloved home church had imploded after the pandemic. My husband got a new job and we moved here from Pennsylvania. This child skipped first grade and started life in a new school in a new state and now all the grandmas have to get on airplanes to come see us. And in the upheaval — it dawns on me slowly — we also probably let our kids eat a lot of candy. I had expected a routine appointment, not this sentencing to The Jail of Mom Guilt. The dentist closed our appointment by asking, “Any other questions?”
“Yes," I gulped. "How much of an indictment is this on my character?”
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Mom guilt is powerful. As a mother, you’re sure you work too much and also not enough. You pack the wrong things for lunch. Your kid doesn’t do enough chores, whines too much, doesn't obey quickly enough, takes too long to potty train. You get too impatient sometimes, but you’re also somehow too passive.
You know how pop dietary advice shifts with the wind? It contradicts itself until you die of starvation because nothing is permissible to ingest anymore but a bowl of reverse-osmosis ice cubes. Mothering advice is like that too, but a few staples never change. Every person you see in the grocery store cries, "It goes so fast! Soak it up! Cuddle the baby! The dishes can wait! Don’t blink!” So, obviously, you never blink again. Then, with burning eyeballs but somehow still alive, you sleep when the baby sleeps, wash dishes when the baby washes dishes, take a coffee break when the baby takes a coffee break. Problem solved. But you still missed something. You forgot to tell the 7-year-old to brush her teeth. How many times did you forget? God knows.
Now, at the pediatric dentist, the light above the chair beams down like a toy UFO onto my daughter's placid face. I can see the cavern in her teeth from here, while these angels in latex gloves repair my mistakes. The kind dentist, praising her patience, makes her twice a queen by installing twin silver crowns. Umbilicus once attached this child and me, but now we’re apparently joined at the jaw. Because every time he tells her to open her mouth, I open mine. Yet he says to her and not me, “You’re doing great, pumpkin.”
Baby teeth are God's do-over. One day, my daughter's little crowns will fall out. The dentist laughs and says I don't deserve Mom Guilt Jail. Grace is always hard to believe, much less accept. But what else can you do? Where else can you go?
You can go out to the waiting room, for one, and get a green balloon from the clown-faced helium machine. You can face up to the bill. You can breathe a prayer of thanks for the dentist and for the money to pay him, remembering that so many moms in the world don’t have either. Then you can go buy your poor kid a smoothie.
In a world of impossible expectations and abundant self-criticism, mothers need grace. Moms need to say to other moms in the corner chair, Yeah, I did that too. I missed the mark the first time. In other words, “You're doing great, pumpkin.”
Thank you to Doctor Doug and Teresa at Great Smiles Pediatric Dentistry. Your service to humanity counts.
Chelsea Boes lives in Arden and works as a writer for WorldKids Magazine in Biltmore Village.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: To the mom in the corner chair
