tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips

does this look like a smile with a cavity? of course it does not!



and yet, just add "three year old with a filling" to the box, the u-haul, the cavern that houses my mothering (among other) failures. if you can manage your way past the racks of too-often-worn fuzzy sweaters and green lounge wear and beyond the drawers of my impetuous and over-zealous haircuts, and if you can make it without tripping over the tangle of unfinished endeavors that clutter the floor to the cobweb dusted shelving, you can stick the cavity (and the check i wrote to fill it) in line next to the box of "didn't hear the baby crying while she was watching something forgettable and probably bad-for-her on the tv." you can place it slightly below the buttered paper bags of "fed children popcorn for breakfast. more than once." and you can cram it in directly above the jar of "shares toothbrush with both offspring and spouse on occasion." you'll have to ignore the too-embarrassing-to-talk-about clinkers marinating with fishy oil inside cans with screw-on lids because i'm not going to talk about those, not today.

henry was a champion dental patient, though. he sat, spat, winced, yawned for the drill, the fill, the super-scary sucker thing. he said, "thanks guys!" to the assistant and the tanned dentist who certainly had to notice my own pearly whites as they chomped on sugar-filled gum, who was most assuredly thinking phrases such as "mothering failure" and "bob dylan t-shirt = trashy mom without dental floss." in the end we came away with a star in henry's tooth, a dinosaur glider, and a resolution to brush jude's teeth all the more vigorously.

the most noteworthy, perhaps, is that the procedure itself took the dentist approximately six minutes to accomplish. the star was sixty one dollars even. so, one can deduce that the dentist makes just over ten bucks a minute, six hundred dollars an hour. at that rate i should have been a dentist, we all should have been orangely tanned dentists. too bad people value their teeth more than their musical educations, that's all i can say.