Capitulate Now: Issue 16

Movement/Containment

I'm sitting here on the couch, attempting to work.  I have been felled by some kind of summertime Daycare Crud.  It feels like the shades are pulled down behind my eyeballs.  I'm considering taking another Dayquil; I'm also biting dully on the invisible braces that my new dentist gave me for my teeth yesterday, my aching, groaning, imperceptibly straightening teeth.  I feel a kinship with my teething 9-month-old and his collection of chew toys; I probably have the same vacant, vaguely upset look in my eyes as I sit here, worrying the supple plastic wrapped around my teeth. Chomp chomp.  

I'm still getting emails from the old dentist, the one downtown, saying I'm overdue for a cleaning.  Will I call them and confess my betrayal, or is that too much work, is it better to just let them email me until I'm dead?  I started going to them eleven years ago because they were covered by my insurance at my weird niche newspaper job, and they were only a few blocks away from the office.  Then Ryan and I moved away from DC, and then we came back; I got jobs in different parts of the city, but this place was still commute-adjacent at least, and so I went back to them.  They were fine.  It was a big practice and I rarely saw the same hygienist or dentist twice, but I don't really understand what it would mean to "love" my dentist, to abandon this place to keep looking for a dentist I "loved."  Every six months, I endure a mildly unpleasant cleaning procedure, I think about my shitty gums that have been receding since I was in high school, and I listen to a short lecture on brushing and flossing while I nod my head like a person who has never heard of these things before but is going to really give them a very serious try from here on out. How or why a person could attempt to optimize this experience, I don't know. 

We moved to a different quadrant of the city and the dentist was no longer commute-adjacent; still I remained a patient.  I started working from home more and more and shed the commute entirely. It was now very stupid for me to continue going to this place, to step away from my kitchen table and spend up to an hour on a bus and then a train and then another bus to get my teeth cleaned by people I harbored, at best, lukewarm feelings towards. Still I remained a patient.  The thing that finally shook me out of my stupor, that finally drove me to perform that most demoralizing of late-stage-capitalism tasks (i.e. engaging with your insurance for EVEN ONE MOMENT to find an in-network provider of health care), was the moment when, in the middle of my maternity leave last year, probably while actively breastfeeding Gordon, I lifted a bottle of sparkling water to my mouth and clanked the glass against my front tooth, chipping it.

E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y

Have you ever chipped a tooth before?  I had not!  I gasped, ran to the hallway mirror (maybe still clutching Gordon to my boob?  Maybe dumping him, squalling, into a bouncy chair?  Maybe I never had him in my arms at all and thus I cannot even blame this stupid accident on "having my hands full?"  All three of these options are equally plausible; please choose your own adventure), and, my hand clapped over my mouth, forced myself to look.  The chip was very small, maybe even imperceptible, to everyone and everything except my tongue, which was already busy running itself back and forth across this sharp new edge in its environment.  I tried to will myself to leave it alone, to stop touching it, to stop thinking about it, but instead my tongue kept compulsively smashing into it. I wailed in despair. Gordon looked at me and was like "You're already postpartum and weird in the head, so you have about 36 hours to fix this before it drives you actually insane" and I was like "Fuck! I know" and my tongue was like "How are you going to make and keep an emergency dentist appointment of indeterminate length all the way downtown when your newborn isn't even on a bottle yet and wowie zowie this feels weird! Hey lady! Hey lady! Have you felt this?? What is this exactly" and I was like "FUCK" and then I creeped smoothly along the smooch in the yellow wall-paper for a while.

Long story short, I remembered that there was a nice-looking dental practice just down the street from our house a little ways.  I double-checked my insurance (ugh. UGH), made an appointment for the next day on the dentist's classy website, and asked my mom if she could come with me so I could get there about 20 minutes early, feed Gordon in the waiting room, and hand him off to her.  We arrived at the office the next morning and executed the plan.  The dentist was nice and he didn't say anything shitty about my gums.  I walked back out to the waiting room, my tooth intact, my non-hungry child sleeping contentedly next to his grandmother, and I felt the very specific, very powerful sense of triumph one gets when one is a breastfeeding person who has managed to perfectly fit an activity into the limited window available to them, like hammering a peg into a hole.  The waiting room was bright and clean; the street parking was plentiful; the women behind the front desk were nice. There was a brochure for Invisalign.  I took it. 

Now I'm on Day 2 of my Invisalign Experience™ and I feel, frankly, like a Trump voter, specifically like one of those blubbering dimwits who keep giving quotes to reporters like "B-b-b-but I didn't realize things would be like this!"  I did no research into what clear braces would actually feel like, what they would demand of me or my lifestyle; I was just tired of my crooked teeth, tired of not smiling in photos. I wanted to do something to prettify my poor destroyed postpartum x 2 corporeal form, and, as I'd recently re-discovered thanks to my childbirth-related medical expense outlays, Ryan had a buttload of money in his HSA (which we are supposed to be treating like a retirement savings vehicle and like, we are, we totally are?  But just after I take out a big chunk of it to fix my teeth, okay).  Now I've gone and gotten what I wanted.  It is more than I bargained for. 

I took the trays out last night after only a half-day of use and already I was changed.  The taking off of the trays is itself a harrowing experience -- I don't have a good method yet for popping them off, and after about five seconds of trying, unsuccessfully, to remove a painful foreign object from your mouth, a wild animal desperation sets in, drool pooling and spilling past your lip, the whites of your eyes flashing, your mouth full of frightened scrabbling fingers, your brain stem screaming EJECT EJECT EJECT.  Once they were out, I went to close my mouth and something seemed off.  I gingerly shut my jaw, wondering: Did this lower tooth usually run against the back of this upper tooth, in this way?  Have my molars always interacted with each other in this manner?  Was it possible that my teeth had somehow already moved, after six hours?  My mouth felt not my own.

This morning I took the trays out for an hour and I dreaded putting them back on -- the plastic had already worn a couple of small sores into my cheeks, and my teeth ached so deeply, I could think only of icebergs slowly colliding and rubbing against one another, wailing and moaning across the icy seas -- but when I did put the braces back on, I felt relief.  Some of the pain subsided.  My bite felt more natural.  Being free was now a disorderly state; better, then, to keep myself confined. I gratefully imprison my teeth, biting and squeezing and running up against my new barrier, pushing it.  It pushes me back.  It rearranges me.  

Metaphors abound!

You know what this is not a metaphor for, though?  Becoming a mother!

I was going to use this as an excuse to write my favorite *motherhood hot take* which is: Having children has not changed me all that much. Surely I'm not alone in this? I'm the same person, more or less, and I find it weird that I don't hear the same sentiment from other people very often (women, I mean. For obvious reasons, nobody is surprised when men become fathers and are just like "This is cool, I love my kids!  I'm tired and busy but being a dad is great!  And now, to the extent that it's possible, back to my career/hobbies/regularly scheduled program"). I suspect that some of the people (SOME OF THE PEOPLE! Not all! Certainly not you, cherished person reading this idiot newsletter) who experience mind-bending identity shifts after having children are actually just people who have spent all of their adult lives being more or less in control of everything that happens to them, luckily enough, and who also perhaps have been kind of invested in their identity as a free, unfettered person. And then when this kind of person goes and has a kid, a big part of what fucks them up is not being a parent per se; it's being forced, for the first time, to surrender the shape of their days to something or someone else, and it's also learning how to be a person whose inner concept of self no longer matches their outward presentation quite so precisely.  Basically when I hear certain kinds of women (white, straight, cis, educated, rich, influencer-y, you know the drill) with normal pregnancies and normal childbirth experiences and healthy children perpetuate this whole "Motherhood! O! It shall break you open and stitch you back together and you shan't be the same person after this hallow'd journey through yon valley of etc" storyline, the smallest, slimiest part of me is just like...okay girl, sorry that you were so committed to being boring and privileged that it took having a kid for you to learn anything interesting or difficult about being a human!!!  But I feel you, I miss brunch too (jk no I don't).

Howeverrrrrr

a) That is gross and petty and I do apologize to anyone who is annoyed by the above paragraph; and also

b) I myself was, and remain, 100% committed to being boring and privileged, who am I even kidding with this absurd self-own; and also

b) Obviously, for all except the most broken humans among us, becoming a parent does change you in at least one deep, profound way, and I was reminded of this yesterday as I sat on the couch, dulled by cold medicine, squeezing my teeth-bumpers, letting the wave of news about how America is now in the business of kidnapping children wash over me and seep its way into the deepest, darkest caverns of my body and mind.  

That metaphor is maybe the most efficient way to describe it: It is as though I am a seaside cliff, and a few years ago, stories of parents being restrained by agents of the state while they listen to their small frightened children scream for them from another room -- this would have worn me down, battered me, rearranged my coastline.  Now, however, I have experienced some kind of earthquake, and it's opened up these deep, jagged geological seams that don't make much of a difference in the day to day except, of course, when a wave hits, and then the water reaches its cold fingers all the way inside and you feel, for a moment, like you might actually be eroding from within, like large, crucial parts of you are going to break off and fall into the ocean and be lost forever if you think for one more fucking second about the mother whose infant was torn away from her breast.

It's obnoxious to imply that people with children feel more deeply than other people, and I don't want to imply that.  I don't feel more than I used to.  It's just that the absolute screaming horror of life, the noise that you learn to tune out so you can walk around as a functioning human being, finds a new and very potent frequency for reaching you: It vibrates out of the human bodies of your children.  It shrieks at you: These bodies could be taken away. It wails: They could disappear forever and then you would want, so desperately, to obliterate yourself as well.

We threw some money at the ACLU and The Florence Project last month; yesterday, after daycare, I took Gus downtown to a Families Belong Together protest.  Ryan and I had both been working from home all day (me because I never bother to go into the office anymore, Ryan because he finally caught the same cold I had and was approaching its nadir) and although jettisoning our finely tuned weeknight routine gives me the heebie jeebies, for a dinnertime excursion into the city with a toddler no less, at a certain point I just couldn't fucking take it anymore.  Around noon I started saying it out loud.  "There's a protest by the Capitol tonight.  Maybe I'll take Gus," I said.  "I can pick them both up around 5.  We can come home and drop off Gordon. And then Gus and I can get back in the car and go park at the Metro.  It's only two stops to Union Station and then a 7 minute walk.  That shouldn't be too bad."  I started packing the bag -- peanut butter and jelly sandwich, crackers, water, extra outfit in case he somehow uncontrollably shits himself (why am I always planning for this), wallet, sunglasses, wipes -- then stopped and also said aloud: "I'll ask him.  If he doesn't want to go, I won't make him."  I know it's valuable to add our bodies to protests, especially as a person who has zero meaningful say in the makeup of Congress; I also think it's worthwhile to build these things into Gus and Gordon's stories, into their conception of themselves as people who participate, who speak out.  But is it still valuable to do these things on a weeknight, when you don't feel very well, and your mouth fucking hurts, and it's not easy to get there, and your kid doesn't even want to go?

But I asked, and he said yes.  We took his sign from the March for our Lives (and, as a last minute request, his mask from Superhero Storytime at the library) and stood with a few hundred people under the trees, sunlight streaming through the leaves, children running underfoot, adults cracked open.  He chanted "stop it;" he learned to raise his fist.  When things were wrapping up, I lured him back to Union Station by promising him a milkshake.  We shared it on the train, passing the cup back and forth.  I said I was proud of him for coming to the protest, that I knew it was hard to do something at the end of the day when you're tired and would just like to relax and watch TV.  By the look on his face, I'm guessing it had not occurred to him that he could have just asked to stay home and binge a few episodes of Dinotrux. 

But when we walked in the door just in time for bed, he showed Ryan his fist. Daddy, we do this.  We are strong.