Prayers to the Tooth Fairy

Mary's Fake Tooth on a Retainer possesses a quiet sort of sadness.

When I worked at a domestic violence shelter in Southwest Colorado, laughter was accompanied by a flurry of hands rising to cover smiling mouths. Why? Because so many of the residents’ front teeth had been knocked out by their boyfriends or husbands.

Always a bit of a polytheist, during my tenure at the Safehouse I began praying to the Tooth Fairy. For the residents’ protection, for their deliverance from poverty, for new teeth for each woman whose man had tried to make her ugly so she would believe the lie that no one else would want her. So that she would not try to leave.

At that shelter in rural Colorado, domestic violence wasn’t the only thing claiming our residents’ teeth. Several of the women living in the house had been afflicted with “meth mouth,” a condition caused by use of methyamphetamines, which do to teeth approximately what a gallon of battery acid would do to a car bumper. One resident named Susie, who had lost her front teeth from meth use, was thrilled when a Safehouse counselor opened a package and a pile of white Styrofoam packing peanuts spilled out. “May I have some?” Susie asked, overwhelmed by this sudden and unexpected display of abundance from a benevolent Universe. The counselor agreed—not quite understanding the packing peanuts’ appeal—but she found out soon enough when Susie used two of the white Styrofoam peanuts to fashion temporary fake front teeth.

A generous local dentist eventually made Susie a bridge for free. She returned to the Safehouse from that dental appointment glowing with an infectious happiness, smiling widely enough to show off her new grill, no fluttering hand rising to accompany her laughter. But the other women in the house had no such good fortune, because try as we might, we couldn’t find any other local dentists willing to do thousands of dollars of costly dental work for free.

The other option for women who had lost teeth to violent partners was a great national program, Give Back A Smile, which pays for reconstructive dental work. However, the program requires not only a paper application, but also that the survivor have been out of the relationship with her abuser for an entire year before applying.

While the requirement seems sensible enough, it created a barrier for the Safehouse residents that prevented the Tooth Fairy and Give Back a Smile from being able to work their magic. (Many domestic violence survivors live in too much turmoil and chaos to be able to follow through with a lengthy application process; and because economic, emotional, custody and safety issues often drive survivors to return to abusive partners, many survivors could not meet the “one year out of the relationship” requirement).

So while praying to the Tooth Fairy gave me some dark comfort, it didn’t fix the Safehouse residents’ teeth.

More at the jump…

The experience gave me a new perspective on teeth and class. I have always taken my own teeth (and my sense of entitlement about them) somewhat for granted. I, of course, feel entitled to have all of my teeth in my mouth everyday. And if something happens to one of them, I believe I have the right to have it promptly fixed.

This assumption has been tested recently. See, I too have had the experience of having my teeth knocked out, which has thus far has caused me two decades of dental woe.

When I was nine or so and my big sister 12, we were home alone one evening watching television. A disagreement arose over which channel to watch. I wanted MTV. My sister insisted on The Brady Bunch. A fight ensued, during which my sister gave me a hard kick to the chin. My top and bottom teeth slammed into each other perfectly and I felt a mouthful of shattering.

“My teeth!” I cried.

“Shut up! I didn’t even kick you in the mouth,” my sister rejoined.

To which I spat out chunks of teeth coated in blood.

“Don’t tell Daddy! Don’t tell Daddy!” my sister pleaded.

But I could already feel the cool whistle of my inhaled breath on the exposed nerves of my broken teeth. “I think I’m gonna have to tell him,” I said.

My father came home and managed to round up a late evening dentist. There was no question that the teeth would be fixed. Many caps and crowns followed.

Flash forward 20 years: I needed a root canal and then a costly dental implant necessitated by the trauma inflicted by my sister’s kick to my chin.

Now I consider myself to be of the “artist class.” I make enough money at my professional job to pay my bills and shelter my art. But I don’t have any thousands stashed away for a dental emergency.

For me, a benevolent benefactor stepped in to pay for my tooth. A real life Tooth Fairy in the form of my father, who was kind enough to say that since the injury had been incurred on his watch he would pay for first the root canal, then the implant. And so I promptly received the dental work I “deserved.”

Yet when the temporary crown broke off of the implant, I was left toothless for two weeks while the new crown was being made and shipped to my dentist. Sure I was given a “flipper” (aka a fake tooth on a retainer) but the dang thing was uncomfortable as hell and had to be removed when I ate anyway, so that I didn’t bother to wear it much.

But the sight of me with my missing bottom front tooth was more than many of my colleagues could comfortably bear. It was an exercise in class and entitlement to observe how they handled the discomfort of having to look at me when I did not have every single tooth in my head.

Some of them didn’t ask what had happened, yet stared at the hole in my grill with a disturbed intensity.

Others demanded I go down to the dentist and insist on a more permanent tooth right that minute. “Mary, go on back to the dentist and tell them you need your tooth and you need it right now.”

Would they have said such a thing to any of the shelter residents with their missing front teeth, which we all secretly knew would probably never be replaced? And did my colleagues consider that even with our dental insurance, with my current salary, the procedure was actually more than I could realistically afford to pay?

I have a friend named Lucia who grew up in a house with eight siblings and mostly absent parents. She saw a toothbrush for the first time when she was eleven years old. At forty-five, she is saving up for the extremely costly dental work necessary to begin to fix the havoc a childhood of neglect wrought on her teeth. Would my colleagues or friends stare at the gaping holes in her mouth, or demand that she hustle down to the dentist and get new teeth right that day?

I have no answers to these dental queries. I just see these issues of teeth and class and entitlement and lack and dental insurance tangled up like so much dirty floss. In the meantime, I will keep praying to the Tooth Fairy. And hoping she will work her magic on the dental needs of the poor; the abused; the addicted; the Holy and Forgotten Ones

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