Parenting

There’s plenty of wailing, as the boy’s first teeth appear


My son’s first incisors have only just poked through, so there’s no gnashing of teeth just yet, but there is a lot of wailing. Babies cry a lot and sometimes it’s hard to know what it is they have to worry about. My son gets upset around beards and complains in the strongest terms when we refuse to let him eat soil from our pot plants.

When he shrieks because I have stopped him headbutting the kitchen table, part of me starts mentally picking out military academies to toughen him up a bit. But, when it comes to teething, I find it weird that he’s not more upset about the Cronenberg movie taking place inside his mouth.

What’s weirder is that no one else seems to find this as horrifying as I do. Teeth are greeted with joy and celebration, and then we enlist the help of fairyfolk to mythologise their departure and begin the whole thing all over again.

Even my father – a man who famously claimed he’d ‘never met the Easter Bunny’ when we asked why our chocolate eggs arrived each year without ceremony – was a close business acquaintance of the Tooth Fairy, negotiating a 50p-per -unit deal that was remarkably lucrative for its time. Sure, we assuage the pain of a teething child, but as if they’ve grazed their knee or cut their finger. This seems wildly incommensurate with the horror of what’s actually happening, so let me give you a reminder.

Consider, for a moment, that the body’s hardest, sharpest materials – long buried – are now waking up, for the sole purpose of stabbing you from the inside out – your gums reduced to a thin film of pink-white gore, stretched to fissure by shards of hard, white diamond. The flesh is inflamed and swollen for it is, after all, being pierced from within by chthonic tusks driving ceaselessly through the pain barrier and into your waiting mouth.

There is no retreat, for there is no external foe. Like any good horror movie, this call is coming from inside the house. Teeth, the only body parts we keep solely to grind, tear, rip and lacerate, are cutting and twisting from below, slouching towards birth for their first gory banquet – the rubbery pulp of your infant gums.

The fact that this happens to us 20 times when we’re babies, and then 32 more when we’re old enough to remember, is strange, but that we grow to smile at this horror, to look back with fondness at these milestones, is stranger still. Maybe, in the end, that’s all a smile really is; a display of what we’ve endured thus far, a laugh in the face of past hardships, each tooth an archer’s finger formed in a V.

Through all his pain and wailing, we remind ourselves that there’ll be a toothy grin at the end of it, then wobbly molars, and visits from the Tooth Fairy for him, too. I’m led to believe her prices have inflated steadily since we were last acquainted, but, one week into this horror show, I reckon he’s already earned every penny.

Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats





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