Brace Yourself

I am happy to report that the orthodontist’s office has stopped playing Christian rock. It’s bad enough to spend a morning in the waiting room without bringing Jesus into the picture. I suppose some people would feel the need for faith and prayer while waiting for braces. Dear God, don’t make this hurt. Please, Lord, let my teeth look better. Sweet Jesus, how am I going to pay for this? Still, I will take an Air Supply song( "I'm all out of love, I'm so lost without you") over singing His praise any day, especially the day my older daughter, E, got braces.

Yesterday, as I sat sipping my complimentary peppermint tea, resting my feet on a zebra striped ottoman, E became a brace face, a metal mouth. Poor E inherited her father’s tiny bird mouth. She has already been through three expanders and has had her baby canines pulled. All that work was in anticipation of yesterday, the start of her awkward phase.

I am convinced that orthodontics as a practice originated during the Spanish Inquisition. Take the expander, for instance. It has a key which must be turned twice a day to stretch the upper jaw. Everybody knows bones don’t stretch. It’s like the rack, only attached inside the mouth, which means no gummy bears or Hubba Bubba while that metal thing is glued to your teeth. After a few days of cranking, you might actually hear a pop as the bones pull apart a little. That’s how you know it’s working, and if you’re lucky, your kid will tell you what really happened to your new lipstick last week.

Even the office layout is a little shady. At a regular dentist’s office, you have a modicum of privacy in those separate operators. But at the orthodontist’s office, all the kids are lined up within view of each other, not unlike Abu Graib. The theory is that the open floor plan allows the orthodontist to move easily from patient to patient, but I think it is a peer pressure thing. Most preteens don’t want to scream and cry in front of other preteens, let alone gag and puke. It’s imposed social control.

E doesn’t like me to go back with her at the office, which was why I was relaxing in the waiting area with my writing pad and Nook. I don’t know if I make her more nervous or if she doesn’t like me chatting with the doctor, who was a classmate of my husband’s. While she doesn’t want me to wait with her, she also doesn’t want me to leave. I was instructed to check on her progress every half hour like a Thanksgiving turkey. So much for running to the grocery store or Target during that two hour procedure.

Last time I checked on her, she had a giant red cheek expander, which looks like a pair of evil Bozo the clown lips, almost ripping her mouth open. In fact, the whole row of kids back there had their mouths stretched wide open like a herd of laughing horses. Her poor mouth was stretched wide enough to fit in a size thirteen Doc Marten and three tennis balls, and she had little metal brackets glued to each of her teeth. My poor baby. I wish they had a little mini-bar in the lobby to spike this peppermint tea.

She looked so exposed and vulnerable and slightly robotic. She looked like she would need to be wanded at the airport security checkpoint. She looked like any minute, Mr. Roger’s trolley would return from the Land of Make Believe, which must be located in the back of her mouth.

Yes, I took before and after pictures. I did not, however, take during pictures. I am sure, however, that there is a fetish website devoted to those very images. I also checked on her every half hour as she requested, from the attaching of the expander to the gluing of the brackets to the attaching of the wire to the selection and application of the rubber bands. Each time, I would squeeze her hand and look at her, and her eyes would look back at mine with pure misery.

She selected orange and green rubber bands. I don’t know the significance of her color scheme, but I did try to talk her out of the green. She doubted that it would look like spinach stuck in her brackets and disregarded my opinion, which is how I knew she was really okay. It's not a look I would have gone with, but then again, it's not my mouth, thank you Jesus.

We stopped by my husband’s office before I took E back to school so she could show off her several thousand dollar obstructed smile. She slurped her extra saliva and moaned softly to herself in the car ride there. I asked her to say “I am not an animal. I am a human being” to him when we saw him, which she did. She doesn’t know who the Elephant Man is anyway, so it’s not like she knows I was making fun of her. Except I too couldn’t stop slurping, and that got on her nerves.

I am pretty sure she is going to look great when all this is finished, whenever that is. In the meantime, I need to remember how to make my own baby food, since she isn’t eating anything with texture for a while. With those train tracks, the breakouts in the T zone, and the fact that she stands eye to eye, one thing is clear. My poor baby is no longer a baby.