Australasian Dentist Magazine March April 2021

Category 122 Australasian Dentist more OFTEN Jade Richardson By Jade Richardson Reality Bites Teething pains T he first thing I remember is the hot, sweaty nightmare of my first teeth breaking surface. Babyland, that soft, fleshy, milkspell of mother’s body and my own was rent asunder by the alarming slow procession of this dental hardware into my succulent life. I remember this because it was, perhaps, the first time “something really happened” to me, and in me, alone. People don’t believe me, of course, that there are memories, real and vivid, rooted so early in my story. But this is the fact, and as I have grown older, and possibly weirder, and more sensitive to the way my body keeps its own diaries, this memory of the teething rite has pushed its way up, demanding to be admitted, and to receive the benediction of confession. I remember teething. I remember the heat of it. I can see it too, in the pictures that remain of me as a baby, burning red cheeked, gluey eyed and bothered. There is me, under a halo of ivory ringlets, in white cotton dresses, blazing scarlet in the face as I experienced, well before there were words to express it, the first true existential crisis of my lifetime, as the first of my teeth were breaking through. I remember the puzzling, obsessive itch and swelling of it. I remember confusion, irritation, sweats and nightmares. I remember the metal taste of tearing gum, the swelling of my glands, the temper that rose, and the cool touch of pillow, which didn’t last long. I remember the feeling of being pulled, unwilling, into a bizarre new experience of world and body as the superb soft comfort of my mouth, and eventually my whole body, was rent by the coming of those first sensations of sharpness, hardness, pain, and inexplicable change coming on with my first teeth, destroying one way of being, and transforming it forever. Teething, if my memories are reliable, was my first true rite of passage: One taken in the vulnerable isolation of wordlessness, innocence and isolation, which are perhaps, anyway, the hallmarks of initiation in our lives, whether we are pre-verbal babes in arms, or fully articulate, world mastering adults. For when those big critical turns of the mortal coil sweep us up, be they adolescence, depression, debt, marriage, illness, aging, grief, or the coming of death, we are always at the brink of the unspeakable, faces pressed hard against the stark mirror of a fundamental loneliness that is with us to the end. We don’t like to admit this in the West. We don’t like to take our initiations out for air. We don’t have good, true words for them, or places to share them, or even ways to safely celebrate and transform our rites into blessings. We tend to rush on past them, pretending that keeping busy, or marching on, or topping up our glasses, or taking the medicine is enough. We tend to stuff this hard, weird business of living with a body which is having its own strange, painful, sometimes ecstatic experience of itself, to the back of our mental closets. We can be intolerant, ashamed, or perhaps afraid of the rites that come, inevitably, for body, psyche and emotions, and I think this was true for me too then, as I faced the very pressing crisis of my baby teeth, arriving. Mother gave me teething rings, iced, and she sometimes rubbed my gums with whisky. I remember the strange delight of pressing gum against the hard blade of the tooth inside. A few moments of delicious comfort as ice met edge, or the relief of pressing raw gums into hard plastic, then the sizzle of pain, and the headaches and the throb. I remember the excellent burn of alcohol; the flashfire of grandmother’s remedy; its mellow rush and clammy aftermath. I remember my tongue, torn and scalded by constant nervous inspection of the wounds breaking open all around it, and its ever busy scouting for news and explanation of the catastrophy of this immense hardware breaching its succulent nest. The erupting edges of our new teeth are, for baby, the first actual experience of unmovable solid forms inside the body. Teeth feel massive. Do you remember? As I roll these memories around here on the keyboard, I think too, of the first teeth extracted in “the chair”. The crack, pull and crunch of it. The instruments and the cotton wool. I think of drills that have visited the quiet cathedral of my mouth. I think of the day my braces were installed. The sad, wordlessness of that strange invasion of the soft hallows, and the pain, and the heat, and the frenzied business of my tongue as it urgently explored this new, and even sharper scaffolding disturbing its warm nest. I remember the goldfish I was given as consolation. Swimming about bewildered, eyes wide and cheeks as swollen as my own as we stared at each other through a plastic bag in the orthodontist’s elevator. I remember the return visits for tightening. Sweats, headaches, special foods and whisky, now in tiny little sips instead of rubbed in gently by mother’s finger. The mouth has its own biography. It is perhaps, in the modern world, the most visited and reengineered or all our biological spaces. Yes, the tongue and throat are forever jabbering their stories, but the mouth, as a whole, as a landscape, is mostly voiceless. The bitten tongue, the cracked lip, the blister from hot potato, the kiss! The rough cheek, the clicking jaw, dry tongue, ulcer, taste – the desert of hangover and the oasis of grape – these are the secret poetries of mouth. Mouth knows, but we do not speak or even imagine mouth’s story of our first breath, received in this beautiful cavern. We do not like to speak or even imagine our last exhale, as the gorgeous mouth completes its quiet work, and releases the very last expression of our lives back out into the world. We say we “went to the dentist”, but we do not tell what really happens there. What the mouth experienced, what the mouth was made to endure, and the hundred vulnerabilities and crises that the mouth, and only the gentle mouth, holds intimate. u