Friday September 26th – The Impending Delights of Home Dentistry

I have to go to the dentists in less than an hour.  This is a pooh thing.  It’s just a check up and probably a scale and polish (always makes me feel like a dragon car wash thingy), which is fine, apart from the ridiculous amount of money they will gouge from me for even those simple things.  What’s not so fine is that I have to talk to them about Tilly’s teeth.  This is going to be an expensive conversation.

When her top two front teeth came out, one of the new ones grew in beautifully.  The other was a nightmare.  She experienced a lot of pain with and it seemed to be taking ages to come through.  I took her to the dentist and it turned out that she had an extra front tooth growing through the roof of her mouth (aaaaarghhhh!), which was pushing on the proper tooth and stopping it from growing properly.  She had to have this rogue tooth (now do you see why I am convinced Oscar may well be turning into a shark?) removed at vast expense.  The new tooth grew in crooked, but the dentist said to give it twelve months to see if it would right itself.  Twelve months are now well and truly over and it is still crooked.  She also has, according to the dentist, too many teeth for her mouth, which will mean crowding and crookedness and other things beginning with ‘cr’ that a girl just doesn’t want for her teeth unless she’s thinking of becoming a snaggle toothed crone when she leaves school.

This will mean extractions and braces.  This will mean big, big moolah.  The estimate he kindly sent me through the post two weeks ago is an astonishing £260 just to ascertain what needs to be done next, using lasers and satellites and the latest technology from NASA presumably.  I really need to talk to him, possibly cling to his leg bleating and pleading poverty and the imminence of the gutter.  I’m not looking forward to it at all.

It’s one of those things that really has to be done.  She cannot wander around with teeth that resemble stairs for the next forty years.  We are no longer in the 1950’s and if she ever wants to make it big in the states and blind Tom Cruise with her pearly whites she will need adequate teeth.  Nevertheless I can see the bill racking up to the thousands mark with no trouble at all and I feel annoyed that it has to be spent on teeth when we could be spending it on holidays, or Louboutins or house keepers or something.  When I start thinking that I catch myself justifying this refusal with things like: ‘Well, it’s not as if she can’t eat, and she’s not in pain.’  Then I remind myself how traumatised I was as a teenager when my parents refused to pay for contact lenses on the grounds that glasses were fine and lenses were too expensive.  I think of the years I would have been teased less at school and immediately flagellate myself with a varnished photo of a pair of Louboutins for being a bad parent and giving in to my inner Imelda Marcos.

This is unfortunately the tip of the dental iceberg.  Tallulah has a tiny mouth, which is astonishing for a child who makes so much bloody racket she can make your ears bleed at forty paces.  She, like her brother, cut her teeth slowly and with a great deal of anguish.  It turns out that the reason for this is that she has the teeth of a circus freak.  She has two teeth for every one root.  The dentist was fascinated and has plans for her to make his fame and fortune in ‘Teeth Weekly: First for Teeth.’ with his cutting edge article: ‘Watch the Freaky Teeth Girl in Glorious Technicolour’.  Sadly for him, she has no problems with them yet.  Sadly for me, she has a much smaller jaw than Tilly and although her weird teeth will have stretched it slightly, the dentist thinks we are going to run into problems when her grown up teeth come through. At this point nobody knows whether her grown up teeth are going to have one root to every two teeth either, so we are watching her like a small, toothy time bomb.  I pray a lot.  I hope her head does not elongate to accomodate them and she turns into Charlie The Crocodile from Maisy.  As it is when I decided to call her Tallulah, Matilda said: ‘You can’t call her that mama.  It’s a duck’s name!’ I pointed out that Tallulah Bankhead had the name first, but it cuts no ice with a self confident three year old.

Now Oscar is cutting what are probably his seventh row of teeth I know that I will gradually become more and more impoverished as the dentist grows fat off of the back of our earnings.  Eventually, when we are all living in an old soup tureen at the side of the road and eating scrambled egg out of a shoe using a comb, we will be forced to buy a home dentistry kit from EBay and do it all ourselves.  It will be like Marathon Man with midgets.