Snaggletooth
By Carrie Stallings
@stallica
As a fresh-faced 15-year-old with perfect teeth, I couldn’t have known I would one day develop a deep appreciation for adult braces. Like the singularly lucky servant of Job, I alone escaped to testify while all five of my siblings smiled close lipped for their driver’s license pictures, fooling no one.
Twenty years later, the tables had turned. Now I was the one smiling close lipped while my siblings flaunted their perfect teeth. Every time I saw a photo of myself, I grimaced. One of my upper front teeth hung considerably lower than the other, even beginning to clamp over my bottom lip like the Hunchback of Notre Dame’s.
When I mentioned this to my friends, they would protest.
“Why do you need braces? Your teeth look fine!”
I would describe the problem and they would study my teeth for a minute, then react the same way they reacted when I explained that my ears are different heights.
“Hmmm, yeah, I guess I can see that. But it’s not that noticeable.”
What this phrase really means is, “Oh, it’s very noticeable, but I still like you as a person.”
The incident happened when my son was four, my daughter was two, and I was pregnant with my third child. We were deep into summer and playing with a water hose in the back yard had long since lost its thrill, so the kids and I had driven to a water park about 40 minutes away.
Three hours and several dozen goggle adjustments later, my son begged me to come play in the kiddie area with him one last time before we went home. He promised it would be “billion million infinity fun,” so I heaved the 2-year-old onto my hip and waded into the pool.
Five seconds later, he jumped out of the water a little too close to me, knocking me square under the chin.
Worth noting: my son has a rock-hard skull. Much like an 18-wheeler facing off against a Toyota Corolla, he will always come out on top in a collision. Blinded by shock and pain, I wobbled, struggling to keep my daughter upright in my arms. My mother instincts quickly kicked in, as I scooped my son onto my other hip and tried to get my bearings.
By this point, the lifeguard and several squeamish parents had noticed the blood pooling around me. The lifeguard blew her whistle and evacuated the entire pool—kiddie area, slides, and lazy river alike. My children, terrified by the sight of their mom covered in blood, screamed and writhed in my arms as I looked for a staff person who might be able to help. My third child, safely cocooned in my womb and unaware of the nightmare unfolding around him, simply rolled over and continued to exert pressure on my pelvic floor.
A skinny, bewildered teenager in charge of operations that day met me at the front desk and asked if I was okay.
“Do you have a first-aid kit?” I yelled to her over the wails of the children.
“A first-aid kit?” she repeated, as though we were at the Macy’s shoe department and I had asked for a socket wrench.
“Yes, a first-aid kit. Like some gauze or something to stop the bleeding?”
“Braden, do we have a first-aid kit?”
Braden looked up from his phone, blinked at me, and said he would go check.
I saw a bathroom and headed toward it in pursuit of paper towels. Something about Braden’s demeanor suggested he would not be coming back with gauze anytime soon.
“Oh, that’s the staff bathroom,” still-bewildered-but-sure-of-the-bathroom-rules Maddie told me.
“Um, can I use it?” Blood continued to drip onto the front of my swimsuit. The children’s cries had quieted to a whimper.
Hearing the edge in my voice, Maddie said, “Oh, yes. Of course. Here,” and held the door open.
With no paper towels in sight, I settled for the next best thing: toilet paper. I set the kids down on the bathroom floor and unrolled a generous length of single-ply, wadding it up into a ball the size of an olive. I pressed it against my mouth.
Up until that point, I had not evaluated my injury at all. I had no idea where the blood had been coming from. I looked in the mirror and removed the toilet paper, which left little traces of itself stuck to my mouth. There was a red split in my swollen lower lip. My teeth didn’t look right. I couldn’t remember how they normally looked, but it was not like this.
Maddie yelled, “Do you need anything?” from outside the door.
I needed a capable caregiver for the children, sanitary absorbent material that wouldn’t stick to my lip (you know, the kind found in a standard first-aid kit), an ice pack, Tylenol, and a chauffeur to get us home. But I didn’t want to seem high maintenance, so I said, “I’m okay, thanks.”
When the bleeding slowed, I emerged from the bathroom considerably worse for the wear. Maddie said she’d need to file an incident report and asked me to sit down so we could go over what happened.
“So, what happened?” she began, reasonably.
“Well, we were in the kiddie area—”
She typed this into her computer, hunt-and-peck style, but got hung up on the sixth word.
“How do you spell ‘kiddie’?” she queried.
I admired her attention to detail but felt she lacked situational awareness.
“Uh, I think it’s k-i-d-d—” I offered.
“Wait.” She found the k and the i with no problems, but needed clarification on whether it was one d or two ds.
This was more painful than the incident itself, much more painful.
We made it through the description of the incident (“We were in the kiddie area and my son jumped up and accidentally hit my jaw with his iron skull”) and Maddie submitted the report for review by the water park board of directors, I guess. Braden, having come up empty-handed on his first-aid kit search, had returned to his phone. I thanked Maddie for her help and headed back out into the sun to gather up our wet towels and snack trash.
My minivan, the only hero in this comedy of errors, opened her sliding doors with the click of a button and welcomed her battered, sunburned occupants. It was not the time to worry about damp, possibly peed-in swimsuits, so I didn’t. I stuck a towel on the driver’s seat under my own soggy bottom and we made our way out of the parking lot and onto the interstate.
On the drive, I called my husband and explained what had happened. We made it home around 4:30 p.m. I had hoped he might beat us there, but no luck. I went ahead and bathed everyone, hung the wet towels on the fence, and helped myself to some Tylenol.
When my husband finally got home a little after six, I burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, as bewildered as Maddie.
“I really needed you to come home and you didn’t!” I was the one wailing now.
The precise words spoken in our phone call that day are forever lost to history. I only know that I meant to communicate, “I’ve experienced minor trauma and can no longer function in my role as parent. You need to come home ASAP.”
What he heard was, “I bit my lip at the pool. Dinner’s at six.”
I went to the dentist the next morning to have him evaluate the situation.
“If you had come in within the first four hours, I could have pushed the tooth back into place. But now it’s already firmed up.”
He gently pushed my lip out of the way and studied my teeth for a minute.
“Don’t worry, it’s not that noticeable.”
Guest essay written by Carrie Stallings. Carrie is a writer, editor, and mother of four. She lives with her family in Midland, Texas, where there is not a lot to do in the summer or any other season. Books, podcasts, and email newsletters keep her connected to people with different perspectives. She rotates through five different colors of the same H&M t-shirt every week and hopes nobody notices.