Lion and Magic Boy

Serena had oral surgery yesterday, and she stayed home from school today as a result. She has a congenital condition that resulted in extremely soft enamel, and her six-year molars came in already with huge holes in them, too large to be saved even with root canals and crowns and years of ongoing dental work, so our very very famous and brilliant dentist (inventor of the Bop Stopper) who writes lots of brilliant articles that use really really big words like “neutrophilic leukocytes” and “tooth avulsion” and who also knows Dr. Spock! And other celebrities! And he wrote a book! Several! which makes him a really really extra-special good dentist, right? told us that if Serena was his little girl (she totally cringed when he said this, like, was I going to give her away, maybe?), he’d have those awful, nasty teeth removed. Pronto.

So we did.

They are huuuuge, by the way. With big black holes in them. Serena kept one and offered up the other as a sacrifice to the Tooth Fairy, who rewarded her with some gorgeous but maybe kind of lame (if you’re 6) Waldorfy postcards, but maybe that’s all she had in her stash that day. I was hoping maybe the Tooth Fairy would bring her a pony or something, after all, this was surgery, complete with general anesthesia and EKG hookups and probably tubes and all, which I was mercifully spared from seeing since I had been banished to the waiting room where I imagined the worst, making myself crazy by wondering, would she make it out of the anesthesia? Or would she become one of those horrifying statistics you hear about and hope it’s happening to someone else, not that you wish that tragedy on anyone but you simply can’t imagine it happening to you. At least I was spared from wondering too deeply about Serena’s potential fate because The Ex was there and chose, out of the thirty or so possible seats in the waiting room, to sit in the one right next to mine and so I spent the hour mostly concentrating on leaning as far to the other side as possible while not being too obvious about it so as to avoid the possibility of accidentally touching the arm of the man I spent ten years sharing the bed of.

Serena’s teeth, by the way? Totally fine. She was a champ, and only dissolved into post-anesthesia tears when she saw me after the ordeal. But I’ve kept her coked up on Ibuprofen, so it’s hard to tell whether her lack of post-op pain is due to the fact that this is the strongest drug she’s been on in her lifetime, that’s right, nary an antibiotic has passed the lips of my little girl, or whether she’s just glad to be home from school, the torture that is a 1st grade Waldorf school classroom, all fairy tales and painting and recess as far as I can tell and certainly a far cry from the rulers and paddles that inhabited my own 1st grade.

The problem, the reason she’s home today, is from the other procedure she had done at the same time that her two decayed monster molars were removed: a lingual frenectomy.

A word or two about Serena’s tongue. When she was born, they said, “She’s tongue tied. You’ll have to get that snipped.” And I’m all, “No way are you touching any part of my child, much less cutting anything in her sweet little rosebud mouth, especially not her tongue that’s all cute and pink and like maybe 2 centimeters long! Please tell me about the accuracy of the snipping machine, will you? And get out of my child’s mouth!”

So we didn’t do anything.

I was told, “You’ll never be able to breastfeed her successfully.” (She went the longest of any of them, 3.5 years. Shh. Don’t tell the breast police.)

Then they said, “She won’t be able to talk properly.”

Incredibly and loudly vocal early on, she was speaking complete and articulate sentences at 18 months. And hasn’t stopped since.

Then they said, “It’s going to cause orthodonthia problems.”

And I’m like, “I’ll believe that when I see it, like everything else.”

But then she said, “I can’t stick my tongue out like everyone else.”

And I had to think, wait, no ice cream cones? No french kissing? I need to rethink this.

So the tongue thing was done while she was under for the teeth, a quick little buzz with a laser. No problem, they said. It heals while it cuts!

There is a problem. Somehow she’s developed this ginormous Fat Lip as a result. Personally, I can’t see how the huge permanent-pout lower lip she’s got now could have been caused by something that happened underneath her tongue, but that’s what they told me.

At any rate, she’s home now, and I took advantage of her excellent brother-sitting abilities to run up and have a quick shower. She’s almost 7 and is more than capable of keeping Eric from throwing blocks at the television or taking the lid off the cat litter box or thrusting wooden spoons down the heater vents for ten minutes.

So I ran up and turned the water on so it wouldn’t be ice-cold when I stepped in. Meanwhile, I undressed. The water is taking an extraordinarily long time to heat up. I’m cold, and naked, so I decide to do a few jumping jacks to keep warm.

Big mistake. BIG mistake. There is a large mirror directly in front of me. I have an excellent view of myself, bouncing up and down. Naked.

Let me digress just a bit and tell you about the fantasy I’ve built for myself these past several years. Knowing that the absolute apex in hotness was reached when I was 25 and Nicole Ritchied myself down to 93 pounds (I’m 5′7″), ever since I went back up to a “normal” weight I’ve engaged in various methods of covering the bits and pieces of my body that didn’t look so nice.

Four children, four pregnancies, can take a toll on a body. Things are a little more, uh, loose than they used to be.

This is coverable. Especially in winter, when layering and long sleeves aren’t considered freakish. Shorts? Absolutely not. Tank tops? No one has seen my arms since 1997.

So the sight of my pale and rather lumpy body lurching up and down in the mirror was a bit startling, to say the least. But I was mesmerized. On the one hand I was saying to myself, “Water, hurry up and get hot so I can stop this madness!”, but on the other hand I was coldly and almost dispassionately looking at my thighs which resembled two 3-ton albino elephant seals in an unfortunate and lumbering approximation of a mating dance, undulating in painfully slow and arduous motion.

I’m thinking about the bouncing, this scary sight, while at the same time remembering that Jack LaLanne invented the jumping jack, the movement that was causing my bathroom floor to bow with every landing of my larger-than-I-thought-it-was body.

Remember Jack LaLanne?

I grew up watching him. The babysitter I had in the 2nd grade used to have his television show on as entertainment while he skipped rope for like half an hour. (Why did I have a male babysitter anyway? Mom? Any answers here?) I remember Jack LaLanne, his belted jumpsuit, his perkiness, his robotic quality.

When Jack was my age, the age I am now, he swam the Golden Gate channel while towing a 2500 pound cabin cruiser. When he was 70, he swam a mile and a half in Long Island Harbor, towing 70 boats carrying one person each. While handcuffed. And shackled.

Damn. I’m putting my clothes on now. And maybe covering that mirror. Forever.

[tags]egocentric dentists, tooth fairy, elephant seals, aging exercise guru[/tags]