Tell me the truth: did you ever think about how and when your kid would lose her teeth? Did you ever have any sense of what it might be like and how you might talk about it with your child? Had you considered that it might actually be a little distressing to explain to your preschooler that all her teeth will slowly fall out of her head?
Because I had not, and I wish I had.
It’s not that I didn’t know about losing baby teeth. I knew that one day, all the tiny bones in her jaw would fall out and the larger ones that had lurked behind them for years would come popping through. But considering just how weird that actually sounds, I put the thought far, far out of my mind. Surely, it couldn’t be as bad as when my kid got her teeth in the first place. Because teething is the worst, right?
I think I was at least a little wrong with that one. As it turns out, losing a tooth is actually kind of tough, too. When my oldest child developed her first loose tooth, she freaked out. It bled. It hurt. It got wiggled all out of place in her gums. It was hard to eat. At first, we thought something was really very wrong. Had she injured a tooth? We legitimately had to look it up online to learn: no, she’s nearly six years old. She’s just about to lose a tooth.
Around age five or six, your child is likely to start losing her first teeth. Teeth tend to fall out in roughly the same order that they came in, so the bottom two are probably the first to go. Even if your child does injure one of those teeth around that age, it will mostly speed up the process of the tooth falling out and leave a gap for a little longer than usual while the permanent tooth below grows in.
And speaking of that gap: oh, that gap. After a few years of my little one having a exemplary set of perfect, tiny teeth, I had not prepared for her losing one. All of a sudden a baby tooth was gone. Like I needed reminding that my little girl, with her long legs and early reading skills, was no longer a baby – now she’s actually lost a baby tooth. It’s like the reverse of a milestone: baby’s first step towards being not a baby, at least as far as the dentist was concerned. I never had a chance to take one last look at her mouth full of baby teeth. I had a distressing amount of nostalgia over that newly gap-toothed grin.
But to get to that gap, you have to get the tooth out in the first place. I have a memory of a teacher’s aide in kindergarten who was the go-to for tooth pulling. If you had a tooth hanging on by a thread, you went to her. She closed a door, a few seconds passed, and the kid returned triumphant with a tooth in hand. I would now like to give that woman a medal, because pulling teeth is like… well, not like pulling teeth, exactly. It’s not tedious or exhausting. It’s actually just sort of gross. My daughter’s second loose tooth, close on the heels of her first, bothered her too much so she let me reach in and yank it.
Process that: I put my hand into my kid’s mouth and pulled out a previously-attached body part. No one really tells you just how strange that is.
And then what of the tooth? Your sweet, trusting kid puts the tooth under her pillow because you have promised her that someone called the Tooth Fairy will sneak into her room late at night, while she sleeps. As creepy as that sounds, it’s a good thing, because the Tooth Fairy will take the tooth and leave money. But then what will she do with the tooth? Why does a strange, mythical creature have part of my kid’s dental record? And when you think of it that way, is it any more strange that I may now have a small container hidden in my closet with two of my daughter’s teeth in it? What on earth are you supposed to do with old baby teeth? Theoretically, of course.
But then, this is just the truth about parenting. It’s all sort of weird and strange and something you’d considered in theory until you actually had to do it, when you realized: this is so much more hard and messy than I thought. No one knows if they’re doing it right. You are far too intimately connected with the minutiae of a small person and all her needs and worries. You will always overthink every choice you make. Your emotional response to every parental action, even one as mundane as pulling a loose tooth, will cause you to think: am I a bad mom because that was hard?
Let me answer that for you: no. You’re not a bad mom. You’re a mom, and this is a hard job, and you can’t always know how you’ll feel about parts of this weird work until you actually have to do it. Maybe it’s teeth, maybe it’s leaving for kindergarten, maybe it’s having The Talk, maybe it’s learning to drive – who knows? Something is going to throw you way more than you thought. And you’re going to be okay because you love your kid and you’re doing your best.
And sometimes, doing your best means letting someone else pull the tooth as it dangles by a tiny strip of gum tissue. Because honestly, that is just too much.
