The God's Honest Tooth 🦷
Alternative titles include: Tooth Story 2, Toothgether Forever, and The Emperor's New Tooth
We call our first set of teeth, “baby teeth,” which is infuriating to a ten-year-old who desperately wants to be seen as a teenager … a teenager with TEEN TEETH, obviously (Ugh, no one understands me, JEEZ! Sabrina the Teenage Witch never had to deal with this shit.)
Maybe it was the combination of wanting to feel older and the promise of 50¢ from the tooth fairy under my pillow, but I wanted to yank out all my teeth as soon as they started wiggling. I reveled in the spaces of coppery, slick gum the lost teeth left behind. It was evidence of my impending adulthood, just like my oval framed wire glasses and the butterfly chair from Claire’s I bought with my own money. The sooner I was smiling with adult teeth, the sooner I’d have my driver’s license and TGIF show about the antics of navigating my newfound magic powers while living with my whacky aunts and talking cat.
The baby teeth, they had to go.
My siblings got in on the fun, too. We tied loose teeth to the door knob with floss and slammed the door shut (didn’t work), shot mashed potatoes through our front tooth gaps (worked very well), and once, my brother lost a tooth at the dentist — he brought the blessed artifact home in a teeny plastic treasure chest and I’m still jealous.
Meanwhile, one dentist chair over, I was being told I would need braces after all my bottom adult teeth grew in. You’d think this would upset someone who was convinced she’d have her own TGIF show, but I was delighted. My child-brain associated braces, too, with being a grown up. “You have an extra baby tooth down here,” my dentist pointed out on an x-ray, “but no extra adult tooth down here.” Indeed, where the second-string tooth should’ve been, there was blank darkness, mirroring the empty space that’d be permanently left smack in the middle of my smile once that extra baby tooth hit the road. Braces would push all the other teeth together to fill the space in. I was thinking pink rubber bands would probably be my first choice, but I would be okay with purple ones, too.
All I had to do was rip that sucker out of there.
*
The fact that teeth are outside bones that literally FALL OUT OF OUR HEADS and then regrow, popping up from our gums like tulips after winter, is a miracle we take for granted — understandably, considering most of us carry a hand-sized super computers in our pocket and no one reading this has ever suffered from the bubonic plague (I hope).
But historically, people have recognized the magic of teeth. Allegedly, parents used to throw their kids’ teeth in the fire as a way of protecting the children from witches. Saints’ teeth were kept as relics in case they could provide stronger channels to the big guy upstairs. Buddha’s teeth are on display all over the world, including one in Rosemead, California that has — how do I put this? — grown. Like, a lot. It looks more like a jumbo marshmallow than a tooth at this point, but that’s part of the miracle actually.
There are old wives tales of overlapping teeth being a sign of long life and good fortune. Meanwhile, the French feel almost the opposite: they call gap teeth “dents du bonheur,” which translates to, “lucky teeth.” In days of no dental hygiene, I bet anyone with any teeth felt bonheur, but I love the way humans can find meaning in even the smallest, most natural events.
*
What would old wives have to say about my extra tooth?
The baby extra tooth fell out unceremoniously, but I was pretty surprised when, a few weeks later, an adult replacement started growing in. Somehow, an extra extra tooth hid from my dentist in his x-rays. The gaping hole in my bottom row of chompers didn’t need to be fixed by braces; an understudy had been waiting in the wings all along.
So where most people have four little lower incisors, I have five. They get along well, considering they are sharing a room, and I’ve never needed orthodontic assistance.
Trying to find some cool lore about extra teeth, I didn’t come across anything exciting.
Except …
That Freddie Mercury had four extra teeth. His bandmates apparently were dicks about how they stuck out, but Freddie refused to mess with his mouth in case it impaired his vocals. I mean if having four extra teeth means you are Freddie Mercury, then I’m choosing to believe my one extra tooth holds extraordinary powers.
And I think that’s going to make a fabulous premise for my TGIF show.
😂😭
