So, What Are We Supposed To Do With All These Teeth?

I care more than I ever thought possible about my children losing their baby teeth. As it turns out, it’s not really about the teeth.

Jan 19, 2024

*Background painting—Mother and Child by Mary Cassatt*

One

It all started the day my five-year-old’s best friend announced her first wiggly tooth.

“Wait, what?” I said to her mother, sitting nearby. “Already?”

She shrugged and nodded with an expression I knew well—the tired resignation of a mother realizing her child would grow older, with or without her permission.

A few days later, she texted me a photo of her daughter, a huge grin spread across her face, one Tic-Tac-sized gap where her baby tooth used to be.

“Wow,” my daughter said, looking over my shoulder. “I can’t wait to start losing my baby teeth.”

Two

I begin dreaming about baby teeth—the same dream night after night. In the dream, my five-year-old stands on her tiptoes, balancing precariously on the bathroom stool. She strains to see her open mouth in the mirror, wiggling one of her front incisors with her index finger until it finally falls out. Dropping the tooth into my open palm, she looks up at my face expectantly with a new, gapped grin.

When morning comes, I slump to the kitchen while my five-year-old chatters on and on, following close at my heels like a happy golden retriever.

She pauses to smile up at me, and my dream presses, again, on the edges of my memory.

I pick up my phone and text my friend. “Okay, but what do we do with their baby teeth once they fall out?”

I consider the options, all of them vaguely horrifying: teeth rolling around in the back of some junk drawer, teeth stored in an old jam jar like loose change, teeth hidden away in my daughter’s treasure box, mixed among her colorful pebbles and sea shells.

My friend texts back: She had planned on saving only the first one, but so far can’t bring herself to throw away any of them.

Neither of us understands why we’re suddenly so attached to our children’s baby teeth.

Neither of us understands how, exactly, we got here.

Wait, what? we are saying.

What?

Three

The next day, during my children’s rest time, I stumble on a Reddit thread titled, “So, what are we supposed to do with all these teeth?”1

Intrigued, I click on the link and scroll—down, and down, and down. One commenter suggests planting them in the soil underneath a tree. Several others explain how their parents gave them old pill bottles filled with their baby teeth after they moved out of the house. Yet another says he and his wife keep their children’s teeth in their fireproof safe, but would have no idea how to explain this choice if their house did, in fact, burn down one day.

The further down I scroll, the more unhinged the comments become: Use the teeth for witchcraft and spells! Make a doll with real teeth from your child’s mouth! Save the teeth so you can perhaps one day clone your own children! Keep them for stem cell harvesting! Halloween decorations! Science experiments! Jewelry!

I laugh so hard that I snort into my coffee mug.

And then there is this: The further down I scroll, the more I realize this is not about baby teeth, at all. Not really.

One mother writes how she keeps her children’s baby socks in her nightstand drawer.

Another admits she has saved a bag of expressed breastmilk in the back of her freezer for fourteen years.

Yet another mentions a small lock of hair from her child’s first haircut, stashed away, somewhere in the basement.

It is these comments that undo me—all of us mothers, unmoored by the oceans of liminal space we travel with our children. All of us mothers, holding tenderly the socks or the frozen milk or the lock of hair. All of us mothers asking, Weren’t we just right there?2

Weren’t we just stretching the baby socks over their chubby, kicking feet and turning the cuff? Weren’t we just sitting in the rocker, watching their hungry, fisted hands unfurl as we offered the bottle? Weren’t we just at Kid’s Hair, where the stylist needed three of those bright red cushions to prop them up high enough in the seat?

Weren’t we just right there?

Four

I tell my husband I am considering saving our children’s baby teeth.

“Not all of them,” I say, “just some,” as if this small distinction makes me sound less deranged.

“No way,” he says, grimacing. “That’s so gross. Besides, what are you going to do with them? Take them out and look at them? Hold them from time to time?”

I do understand his point. A collection of baby teeth gives serious hoarder vibes.

Still, I want to make it make sense. I want to explain to my husband how, with every passing day that I am a mother, I feel the joy and the pain of letting go in a thousand, tiny increments.

I want to tell him how, as a mother, I live daily in the space between joy and grief. I want to tell him how, with every passing landmark of their childhood, I feel a little more disoriented. I keep pulling out the map, trying to locate where we are.

Wait, what? Weren’t we just right there? How did we end up here?

I do not tell him any of this. Instead, I offer a weak compromise.

“What if…I clean the teeth really well before I save them?” I say.

“Fine,” he concedes.

Five

Baby teeth are also called deciduous teeth.

Deciduous, as in the Maple tree in our front yard—always the last tree on the block to lose its leaves every fall.

Deciduous, as in ephemeral, fleeting—lasting for a very short time.

Things that last a very short time:

Leaves.

Baby teeth.

My children, exactly as they are in this moment, now. And now.

And now.

Six

The algorithm keeps feeding me podcasts and articles on the insanity of modern puberty.

Be aware! all the experts say.3 Girls are beginning puberty earlier and earlier with every passing year. Also, don’t forget that it’s also getting longer and longer with every passing year, and that what was once a sprint for us is now a marathon for them. Oh and also, in order to individuate, they will need to kick off of their parents—hard. Oh and by the way, the parent girls tend to kick off of the hardest is typically their mother.4

Sure. Sure, sure, sure. I am saying to myself, as if this information is all very casual and not at all alarming.

What I want is to be good at letting go—a secure, enlightened, up-on-the-developmental-norms mother. A healthy amount of removed.

But I’m not, really.

I’m the mother who wonders how my children have the audacity to follow developmental norms and need me less and less.

I’m the mother weeping over baby teeth.

Wait, what? I am saying.

What?

Seven

I am walking down the path by the frozen Creek, flanked on both sides by a thicket of deciduous trees.

Their bare branches are slick and black in the frigid air, haunting and beastly.

I have walked through these trees in every season, year after year. A familiar cycle of waxing and waning, growth and loss, leaving and returning. Every year a full circle, a sense of completion, like the cadence in a piece of music—a chord finally resolving.

Every living thing, ebbing and flowing.

I am reminded of what I say to my oldest daughter when I drop her off at school: “I go away, but I always come back again.”

A full circle, one complete orbit around the sun, the reminder that even as we’re moving further away, we are already beginning our journey back to them.

And isn’t the same true for them, too?

Eight

I am getting better at keeping scarcity out of my bloodstream, at letting abundance expand my lungs and fill up my ribcage.

I am spending more time savoring the way my two-year-old gestures wildly with her hands when she talks. I am spending more time seeing—really seeing—my five-year-old’s face, how it looks more angular and wise every morning.

I am thinking less about where we just were and less about where we will be soon. I am trusting the circle of things. I am throwing away the map. I am looking at the trees.

“Mom! Mom! Watch me do this dance!” my daughter pleads from her makeshift stage in the basement playroom.