Dental dilemmas and the importance of oral hygiene

I have a thing about teeth.

A straight, brilliant row of chiclets beaming back at me across a room makes my world a happier place.

Crooked teeth, yellow teeth, black broken teeth, or God forbid, teeth with plaque eating holes in them will drive me away faster than you can say, “Three out of five doctors prefer Sonicare!”

I even gagged once, looking at bad teeth.

Now listen, I can be your friend if your teeth don’t meet my happy standards. I have never told someone to bugger off because I can’t stand looking at their mouth.

But I did spend a year directing my vision toward a coworker’s hairline, because his teeth were crawling with little fuzzy enamel-eating monsters.

You can imagine how repulsed I am at the idea of playing that new board game, Speak Out, with plastic mouth pieces that pull your lips back and expose your entire dentition to the world.

I’m gonna just Speak Out and say, Ew Gross, Never Will I Ever, Not Even If You Pay for My Kids’ Braces.

Compared to my husband, I’m terrible at recognizing people. I can remember names much better than my husband, but he stores a face in his brain like all those numbers in his beloved spreadsheets.

We’ve learned to laugh about my complete incompetence identifying movie stars in their new flicks. As I approach my forties, I can’t even name them anymore. My statements sound like this: “Hey! That’s the girl who was in that movie with that big wrestler guy who did the tooth fairy movie, but not that movie, a different one…” It’s cheap entertainment.

Like a bad $10,000 Pyramid game show.

But Chris always figures out what I mean. Then he always counters with a chuckle and a “No, it’s not.” Then I look it up on IMDb and discover that I am, once again, wrong. (As it turns out, there’s a specific disorder that affects 1 in 50 people called prosopagnosia, or faceblindness, that I’m absolutely claiming next time I lose.)

So it’s a big deal if I win one.

Last Saturday, when we briefly met a volleyball coach named Bekah at the Memphis Challenge volleyball tournament at the Cook Convention Center, I only noticed what a nice grill she had. A slender brunette in her twenties, about yay-high, shoulderlength hair in a ponytail. A description that matches half of all volleyball coaches in the entire country.

With a great smile.

The next day, while we were watching a former player compete on one of 27 courts, my husband burst out, “Hey! That’s the coach we met yesterday!”

I followed his finger to the coach. A slender brunette in her twenties, about yayhigh, shoulder-length hair in a ponytail.

With an overbite you could swim under.

It’s like the American Psycho shower scene screeching violins went off in my head. Eee-eee-eee!

“No way,” I said. “Look at her teeth! There’s no way that’s the girl we met yesterday.”

He insisted, and I objected just as insistently.

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Dorothy Wilson The Marion Mom WILSON

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You know what Chris did? He pulled out his phone and looked it up.

I kid you not.

Of course I was right.

Teeth never lie. I got the win on that one, all thanks to my unhealthy dental obsession. I may be faceblind, but I got the drop on the dentition!

On a related note, my teen daughter woke me up around six yesterday in a full-blown panic over her teeth.

She burst into my room and stuck her face as close to my closed eyes as she dared, until I awoke with a start, sucking in my breath as my muddled mind scrolled through the likely emergencies occurring.

“What happened, who’s hurt?!” I mumbled.

“Moooom!” she wailed like only a teenage girl can.

“My teeth are white!”

I narrowed my eyes. Was I dreaming?

This sounded suspiciously like the time I served baked potatoes instead of my typical sweet potatoes, and my son said, “Mom! There’s something wrong with my potato! It’s white!”

Surely my teenager did not interrupt my oh-so-precious sleep to complain that her teeth were white.

On the brink of bawling, her words tumbled out like spilled sugar. “My teeth are all yellow except my front teeth–they’ve got these white splotches all over them, and I don’t understand because I’ve been brushing so well ever since you got me that electric toothbrush for Christmas!”

Still in the dark and unwilling to bear the momentary pain of the light switch, I groped for my phone and aimed the flashlight away from me. “Okay, okay, calm down. Let me see.”

Sure enough, her teeth were white. Remember the Colgate whitening commercial from 1996? A kindergarten teacher is asking her students to name colors. When she says, “What color are my teeth?” the kids pause a beat, and then respond, “Ecru”, “Beige,” and my favorite, “Mother of pearl.” It’s hilarious.

But I was staring at two very white teeth in a sea of mother of pearl.

I shined the flashlight in her eyes. “Go get me your toothpaste.”

She returned, tube in hand.

Still squinting from the bright spotlight in the early morning darkness, I read aloud, “‘Colgate Max Whitening Toothpaste. 80% whiter teeth, guaranteed.’

So… I think it’s working.

Your teeth are white because you’re making them white.”

Panicked Teen giggled.

“Oh,” she admitted, “I thought all the white places were cavities.”

“Now that we’ve cleared that up at six a.m., is there anything else I can help you with?”

She then reminded me that while her actual teeth were becoming whiter, the filling that repaired a hefty chip out of her front tooth would never catch up.

Apparently, amalgam is immune to Colgate magic.

After I promised to pay for veneers if necessary, she breezed out of the room with a beaming smile so brilliant I could see it in the dark. Because Colgate.

Guaranteed.

I texted Chris: Hey, you know that teenage girl with ecru teeth who lives with us and panics all the time?

Start saving now. Veneers= $$$.

He didn’t even argue.

So I’m counting that as a win!

Dorothy Wilson lives in Marion with her husband Chris as they enjoy all the adventures life with their seven children brings. This column originally appeared in the January 2018 edition of the Marion Ledger.