Teeth

It’s at this time of year that I always seem to punish my teeth. The collective disappointments, slights, weather navigation and shit wading of the average day gets taken out on my pearly whites in the form of an anti-brushing movement that has all the nihilism of the vices I used to have.

These days, my vices are few.  I feel too decrepit to have any. I barely smoke, except on rare social occasions when I force myself out of my comfort zone on the sofa with Netflicks. Even my replacement crack pipe, the e-fag has been relegated to sneaky to toilet visits, where I swallow my annoyance in menthol-flavoured huffs so as not to present, in public, as an addict.

Nobody does anymore. My shiny-eyed, bushy-tailed colleagues seem to have mystifyingly escaped the need to vent their spleen on smoking or swearing, though I get the feeling drinking goes on in quiet corners after dark. I’m yet to be privvy to that though. Too new and unquantified to see others with their professional armor dinted.

All I see is a try-hard generation of workers of whom I feign to be one – though technically I’m too long in the tooth, by dint of their smallness I’m not given away – prepared to work hard, skip lunch, go home late, day in day out with nerry a complaint and a perpetually chirpy demeanor. Desperation has made them all angelic. Or just sneakier.

The older ones, the hard bitten, dyed in the wool types are more open about their self-destructive habits, carting round their Marlboro Lights and hangovers like symbols of authority, daring anyone to criticize. It’s been a while since I had the opportunity. I have become resigned to my fate.

This is a life for which we are expected to feel grateful: a nine to six, a house, a family. What more could I want? And I do, I do. But I also feel at this time of year, when I go weeks without speaking to anyone but the same six people, except at work, I recognise that another friendship or two has bitten the dust through neglect, or saying something stupid the last time I had the chance to let my hair down, that I’m just coasting the tides of exhausted possibilities until death.

Life feels to have shut its doors and I’m no longer kicking against them. I’m too tired, mostly. Hibernation has set in for the winter, and falling asleep in front of the telly is par for the course if I’m to function the next day, and sliding into bed without brushing my teeth is the most profoundly rebellious thing I get to do all day. Though having climbed into my jimjams shortly after the kids, my face is usually washed.

Maybe it’s years of braces and nightly oral hygiene insisted upon by my own othadontically challenged father, whose dentist-destroyed smile contributed to a shoulder chip already carved deep by early baldness. In any case, I’m less fussy about my own children’s teeth, short of supplying them with electric toothbrushes and letting them get on with it. Jonah’s have come in straight enough, although are discoloured thanks to my early pregnancy tetracycline use, and Ava’s front ones are greyish where I dropped her squirming as a toddler, face first on a marble floor, but they’ve been wobbly for weeks and are finally on their way out. Perhaps she’ll be lucky like Jonah and end up with adult teeth somewhere between Tom’s big gnashers and my own rather dainty set.

Of course, I brush them again in the morning, floss and even oil pull out of middle-class shame, and have regular dental checkups – to this day I’ve never had a filling. I visit the hygienist to scrape away the accumulation of tea that has got me where I am today. It enables me to sit and concentrate for hours, not smoke, to eschew alcohol, and cope with the early morning insomnia that plagues me when I don’t.

In the morning, all seems possible again; my perfect teeth and rictus grin remain unscathed, although the ulcer on my tongue tells me differently.