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My daughter is eleven and has recently discovered that she can editorialize. We were going through pictures from a weekend at her grandmother’s, and she stopped on one of me standing by the car with my arms crossed.
“You always look like that,” she said.
I asked what she meant. She said, “Serious.”
I laughed it off, and that night I opened the photo app and scrolled backwards. Christmas. Two birthdays. A beach. A cousin’s wedding.
Six years. I could not find a single photograph in six years where my teeth were visible.
What she was actually reading
My daughter has no idea about my teeth. She sees a dad who looks serious in every photograph and, at eleven, she is doing what kids do, which is to build a working model of her father.
Kids don’t read the reason, but the behavior. My son is seven and has started asking whether I’m in a bad mood. I am almost never in a bad mood. I’m just a man holding his mouth shut.
I have spent years telling him it’s fine to say when something is bothering you. Meanwhile I was running a live demonstration of the opposite.
The molar I was going to deal with
I have to admit, I’ve never liked doctors, needles, hospitals or dentists. Not. One. Bit.
This almost killed me at 16, when I refused to go to the hospital (for 3 days!) until a very aching appendicitis had turned into peritonitis.
This time it was about teeth. It started with a cracked upper molar I ignored for about a year, then a root canal that failed, then an extraction. Then a second one on the other side, because the first gap changed how I chewed and I put every meal through the same overworked corner of my mouth.
At every stage there was a version of me who was going to handle it. Next quarter. After the boiler. When work calmed down.
What I told my wife was that it was not urgent. What I told myself was that I didn’t care about my appearance.
That was a lie. I cared enormously. I cared so much that I had rebuilt my face’s default setting around it and had not noticed.
Two in the morning
I had this vague horror-movie idea of implants involving something being hammered into my skull. Reading a breakdown of the dental implants process somewhat deflated my medieval idea. There’s a consultation and a 3D scan. There’s surgery. Then there’s a stretch of months where the titanium screw integrates with the jawbone. Then the crown.
The money conversation was harder, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Implants are priced like a used car, and dental insurance declined me without the slightest hesitation.
Which is how I ended up at two in the morning comparing full mouth dental implants Turkey package deals. My wife found me at it and, to her credit, did not laugh. Instead, she got excited about the idea of a Mediterranean holiday. We built a spreadsheet. We put the treatment, the flights, the hotel and the time off work in one column and the domestic quote in another. The gap was enormous.
I want to be careful here, because this is where these stories usually turn into a nightmare. Going abroad for treatment is risky. I actually spent weeks researching and found a ton of piercing questions and safety checks worth your life. For example, asking what implant brands they use. Asking who handles the operation (it should be a periodontologist or an oral and maxillofacial surgeon), and of course, getting all the answers written and signed.
Where I am now
Mid-process. Bone healing, temporary in place, a few months to go. It is not a transformation story yet and might never be a dramatic one.
But last month my daughter took a photo of me at the kitchen table, mid-sentence, mouth open, looking like an idiot. She showed it to me expecting me to make her delete it.
I asked her to send it instead.
I don’t think she registered anything. She’s eleven. She was on to the next thing in four seconds. But I’ve got it on my phone, and it’s the first picture in six years where I am not managing my own face.
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