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Friday, December 16, 2005

On retainers:  part two

When last we left Jamie Bérubé, it was March 2004, and he had just gotten his braces.  Janet and I told him that he’d probably need to wear them for about nine months, and that we hoped they would come off for Christmas the holidays. 

We hoped wrong.  With each orthodontist appointment, it became clearer that Jamie would be wearing braces well into 2005.  He was getting much, much better at understanding the intermediate future (that is, not next week and not twenty years from now), and partly as a result, he was getting more patient with the constant goalpost-shifting.  After a while, he got used to the ideas that (a) his braces would most likely come off at some point in 2005 and (b) his parents and his doctors couldn’t commit themselves firmly to (a) because they had to keep readjusting their own expectations with each readjustment of the braces.

Jamie’s orthodontist visits varied widely in intensity and duration.  Sometimes he would zip in and out after a checkup determined that everything was fine; sometimes he would need new brackets, new wires, or other procedures that involved keeping his mouth open for long periods (and keeping very still) while people poked at his teeth with metal implements and shone the heating lamp on them (to dry the glue, of course!).  Jamie quickly learned to ask for the zip in-zip out kind of visit upon arriving at the doctor’s office.  “We will just talk and have no tools,” he would propose to the lab assistants, who would usually reply by telling him that maybe they would have to use just one or two tools.  Janet and I, for our parts, traded off taking Jamie to each appointment, but if one of us endured a thrash visit, then the other one usually had to go to the next two, so as to spread the parental dental-care burden around as evenly as possible.

But at long last Gehenna froze over, pigs learned to fly, and the braces came off this fall . . . whereupon Jamie learned that he would have to wear retainers for six months or so.

Retainers!  Jamie complained strenuously, feeling like he’d been betrayed and hornswoggled again.  We assured him that it was only a short-term thing, and we reminded him how terrific he was about his braces, and we renewed the promise of Beef Jerky Yet to Come.  And so Jamie went back to the orthodontist for the forty-ninth time (or thereabouts) and had an impression of his teeth made.  He hated that shit, let me tell you.  Who wouldn’t?  Who gets up in the morning and says, “jeez, I hope I can lie back in a orthodonist’s chair and have my mouth filled with pink goo today”?

Janet and I felt kind of sheepish about the fact that we hadn’t told Jamie what his retainers would entail (honest, we didn’t know!  Janet thought he’d need retainers only at night, and I was completely ignorant of everything), so at first we cheated a little: realizing that he was having a very hard time eating with his retainers in, we allowed him to take them out during meals.  Well, you know where this is going, so let’s get there.  One day I picked him up from the Y and discovered that his upper retainer was missing.  He said he didn’t know where it was, but maybe it came out when he was swimming.  “While you were swimming?” I asked.  “I don’t know,” he shrugged.  “I’m not sure.” Oy.  So one of the Y staff and I searched the entire building, looking for a little black plastic thing with a small metal strip in the front.  Yeah, like that’s gonna show up.

For those of you who don’t know what retainers look like, they resemble small eyeless sea creatures.  Hope this helps:

Why were Jamie’s retainers black, you ask?  Because he’d rejected all these more colorful designs as “too weird,” that’s why.  He hadn’t wanted colored brackets on his braces, either.  He’s just a basic-black kinda kid.

Finally one of the YMCA staff remembered that Jamie had taken out the retainer during lunch and put it in a napkin.  Oy again.  So I started to comb through the lunchroom garbage can—the nice, full garbage can—musing as I did so on the fact that his retainer was very like the color of a Hefty bag . . . when I found it! Readers, I kid you not.  I found it.

I took the opportunity to teach Jamie the phrase “needle in a haystack,” because I know he has trouble with idiomatic expressions.  He thought that was very amusing.  But I also took the opportunity to tell him, sternly, never to lose his retainers again, or he’d have to go back to the orthodontist for another round of pink goo.  He really didn’t like that idea. So he learned his lesson!

But I didn’t learn mine.  Just last month, as Jamie and I went to see Chicken Little (my groundbreaking review of which is here), we stopped at the Nittany Mall for some pizza.  And because we were going to follow the pizza with movie popcorn (crucial five-servings-a-day components of the USDA food pyramid), I told him he could leave his retainers out for a while, and I’d carry them for him.  Why did I do such a stupid thing? Because I was being smart: I thought ahead, and reasoned that it would be a bad idea for him to be popping out his retainers in a dark movie theater.  OK, so guess what.  I wrapped the retainers in a napkin . . . and by the end of our little meal, the table was covered with napkins (this was some seriously unctuous pizza we were eating), and I tossed the whole mess into the garbage.  And even though Jamie was, by this point, especially vigilant about putting his retainers back in (as a result of the Y episode), he didn’t say anything as we left the mall, precisely because I’d told him not to worry about them until after the movie.

I realized what I’d done when we got to the octoplex parking lot and found that I hadn’t, after all, put that napkin in my pocket.  Panicking, I told Jamie we were driving back to the mall, and that I wanted him to stay in the car while I ran to the pizza joint, because I’d lost his retainers and it was all my fault.  “I’ll just look through the garbage again,” I assured him.  “I won’t be long.” “Like a needle in a haystack,” he replied.

But this time I wasn’t so lucky.  I told the guy at the pizza joint that I’d lost my son’s retainers by throwing them in the trash, and he hoisted the garbage bag into the back of the kitchen and sifted through it with me, but, alas, his extraordinary helpfulness was offset by the fact that he didn’t speak much English and didn’t have a very clear idea of what he was looking for.  I tried to insist that I could go through the mess by myself, but to no avail, and he kept tossing things from one garbage bag into another while I tried to unwrap napkin after napkin while sifting through paper plates, pizza crusts, half-eaten calzones, and discarded salads.  “You don’t understand,” I wanted to say.  “If I don’t find these damn things, my kid has to do the pink goo in the mouth thing again, through no fault of his own, just after I threatened him with having to do the pink goo in the mouth thing should he ever lose his retainers.” And I thought of the day, four and a half years earlier, when he’d had to go back for post-tonsillectomy surgery even though he’d been a good kid and listened to his mother about drinking his juice and Gatorade.

We reached the end of the garbage.  I wanted to give a second look to some of the garbage the pizza guy had ripped his way through, but he insisted, “no, is not here,” so I gave up, paid him $5 for his time, and sprinted back to the car, near tears.  “Jamie, I’m so sorry,” I said when I climbed into the driver’s seat.  “I couldn’t find them.  I looked and looked but I couldn’t find them, and it’s all my fault.”

Sweetly, Jamie tried to console me, just as he had when I’d forgotten his backpack.  “It’s OK, Michael.  It’s not your fault.”

“Oh yes it is my fault,” I said.  “I threw your retainers in the garbage, and now we have to get new ones.” Jamie nodded, but then that little light bulb went on, and he asked about the goo.  “Yes, we have to do the goo again,” I replied, “and I’m so so sorry. . . you didn’t do anything wrong. . . .” Well, this was just too much.  Fortunately, Jamie’s gotten vastly more mature about such things, so he didn’t squall or fuss or act out, but he was stunned.  Betrayed yet again! Would the Dental Drama never end?

“Look,” I said.  “I’ll tell you what.  I’ll call the doctor, and we’ll ask for new retainers, and after you have the goo, I’ll buy you that beef jerky we talked about.  Is that a deal?” It was a deal.  Still, I kept apologizing all through the rest of the day (and of course there was a fresh round of apologies to be made when I told Janet what happened), to the point at which Jamie finally said, “it’s not your fault, Michael, it’s my fault.”

“What?” I exclaimed.  “It’s not your fault at all!  You did everything I asked, and I threw your retainers in the dang garbage.  It’s completely my fault.”

“No, it’s my fault,” he insisted, and this went on for a while.

Now, I didn’t believe he really understood the concept of “fault” at stake here.  He and Janet and I have an odd little routine in which I say, “I think this is Lucy’s fault,” he laughs and says, “Janet, say it,” and Janet says, “Michael, you can’t blame Lucy, she’s just an animal.” Jamie likes this routine so much he can do it eighty or ninety times in a row!  Or he would, if we didn’t knock it off after four or five times.  Anyway, I wasn’t sure that Jamie got the joke behind this routine—which is to say I wasn’t sure he understood why you can’t “blame” an animal, which is also to say I wasn’t sure he understood that the concept of blame relies on a whole host of other concepts having to do with futurity, responsibility, likely consequences, right and wrong. . . .  But you know what?  As it turns out, he damn well does understand what he’s saying when he claims that it’s his fault the retainers got tossed in the garbage, and he’s saying (as he’s since explained to me) that he should have kept his retainers in his mouth during meals.  Which is quite true, as far as it goes.  But (a) we allowed him to take them out, (b) his dang fool father didn’t bring along the bright orange retainer case to put them in while he took them out, and (c) his dang fool father put them in a napkin and tossed them in the garbage.  So really, in the end, it’s my fault.

Jamie got his new retainers two weeks ago.  He hated the goo, of course, but he did much better with it this time, and I promised promised promised we wouldn’t be doing it again.  And then I bought him some good, chewy beef jerky, and allowed him two big bites before school.  “How is that stuff?” I asked as we drove away from the convenience store, the one that stocks dozens of varieties of beef jerky, right next to the big display of dozens of varieties of chewing tobacco.  “Really great,” Jamie replied.

I told him he couldn’t get black retainers again, just in case they ever wound up in the garbage.  But he once again rejected all the day-glo colors as too weird and insisted on black.  So we compromised.  We got camouflage-colored retainers.  Oh, heaven help me.  At least they have patches of green, brown, and yellow in them.

Maybe this time we’ve all learned our lessons.  Jamie knows that his teeth are healthy and looking great.  He keeps his retainers in all the time, except when he brushes his teeth.  And his dang fool father has learned that the family dental plan only covers one set of retainers, so, quite apart from the fact that he wants never to subject his son to the pink goo again, he can think back on that exceptionally expensive slice of pizza whenever he needs reminding to take care of his son’s things.

Or, in other words,

Chicken Little matinee: $12.
Popcorn and soda: $10.
Tip for the helpful pizza guy:  $5.
Pizza and retainers: $400.
Jamie: priceless.

Posted by Michael on 12/16 at 09:32 AM
Jamie • (32) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink
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