CATCH A CHEETAH BY THE TOE

Hello, readers—thanks so much for being here, really. The pleasure of being in your (asynchronous) company each week is a preciously rare certainty for me.

A few quick things before you dive in:

1) I’m embedding a janky voice recording of this one because it’s is a bit longer than my usual stuff, and I myself only have time for longer pieces if I can listen while I fail at chores. So please let me know if this is a thing you also find valuable—despite the low-budget audio and my endearing little lisp (what?), and I’ll do it more often.

2) Thank you so much for responding to my pleas/reminders that if you click the “like” / “<3” button at the top or bottom or whatever of this thing, more people see it. I’ve seen an uptick in new subscriptions and followers since you all started getting your excellently capable pointer fingers/thumbs out, which is really lovely.

3) Try the app if you’re at all curious— it’s a nicely formatted and accessible place to read and interact with new writing. I use it regularly and I hate apps, which you will get to see/hear in action in the story below.

4) If you’re thinking about subscribing, know that I am factually, palpably grateful to every single individual who decides to do so, I often have individuals in mind while I’m writing, and, though I flatter myself here, I also see the act of subscribing as a vote in favor of good, non-click-bait-y, non-capitalist-hellscape writing, despite the monetary exchange involved, which I will take as an encouragement not only to keep writing but also to buy a freestanding microphone so I can make better recordings for you.

Last thing: I realized as I recorded a) that I’d made a few errors (and I’m copyediting while I read, which is one of the many reasons it’s a shitty recording) and b) that I missed an opportunity to combine the words “hippy” and “uppity” into “hippity.”

My sincere apologies on this important matter.

OK, that’s it! I hope you enjoy the dentist story. XO, Caro

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Preparation for the dentist appointments began in the morning with a Daniel Tiger episode on going to the dentist. From this episode, my daughter learned that the polishing device “can become warm inside your mouth,” so now, instead of nothing specific to worry about, she had something very specific to worry about. She muttered “it can become warm” all morning between assertions that she would not be joining us.

I was planning to leave at 3:30 for our 5pm appointments. This is because in my estimation it was “going to be better” to go to a place with a cartoon dinosuar on the roof and Baby Shark playing on flatscreen TVs mounted to the ceiling, better to work with people who “understand kids,” than to go to a place that wasn’t 75 minutes away.

During the six-hour window in which the children were with the nanny—which is usually when I begin and abandon my two remote jobs, begin and abandon cleaning the house, do half the shopping because I can’t remember the other half, deal with the neurologically diverse mouse trapped in the playroom, go for a run that takes twice as long as planned, and give up on organizing the spice cupboard, where the only thing I can find is cumin which I hate—I went to the uppity hippie lunch place down the road and ordered a special grilled cheese on sourdough for my children in a gesture of condolence for their upcoming trials.

I was deeply worried about the appointments falling right into the slot where dinner usually goes, because my kids are the Hangry Sort, so I also splurged on a $10 bag of dark sweet cherries. I noted smugly that my children hadn’t had cherries in ages, so this particular food couldn’t be inside the mechanism of their sixteen-day moratorium plan for preferred foods (they like a new food for 1-2 hours, then it is disgusting for sixteen days, then it is acceptable for 1-2 days, then it is entirely unacceptable until further notice).

The nanny returned the children happy, hot, and tired at 3, so we had half an hour to play chicken with the car charger.

I sent the kids out to play in the yard while I packed the food box with all the precious items that were going to make everything OK.

As I was remembering that we also needed a thermos of water and wondering where I might hide if I were a thermos in this house, I glanced at the clock, and it was already 3:35. I yelled to my kids that we were leaving and they returned from the field, to my surprise, which was great, but their faces and mouths and hands—and teeth—were now stained dark purple from the berries they’d just housed.

We left the driveway, still very purple, two minutes past the departure time that would get us there on time, whereupon the maps app started yelling PROCEED TO THE ROUTE and refreshing a glitching screen on repeat.

Me: STOP IT <fiddling with screen, trying to drive>

Maps: PROCEED TO THE ROUTE, PROCEED TO THE ROUTE

Child B: What is RECEDE TO THE BOOT, Mama?

Child A: MOM I HAVE TO POOP

Me: Proceed means to keep—

Maps: PROCEED TO THE ROUTE

Child B: I’m hungry.

Me: I have special grilled cheese!

Maps: PROCEED TO THE ROUTE

Child A: I don’t LIKE grilled cheese.

Me: IT’S YOUR FAVORITE FOOD

Child B: I want a treat.

Me: I have treats.

Maps: PROCEED TO THE ROUTE

Child B: Like what.

Me: I have cherries!

Child A: I don’t LIKE cherries.

Child B: I don’t LIKE grilled cheese.

Me: OK FINE I HAVE AN EMERGENCY REESE’S SOMEWHERE

Maps: PROCEED TO THE ROUTE

Child B: I WANT A TREAT

Child A: I STILL HAVE TO POOP

Me: we can’t pull over yet but we will if you still need to on the other—

Maps: PROCEED TO THE ROUTE

Child B: WHERE IS MY TORSES

Me: ????

Child A: I think I can hold it, actually.

Me: That’s great, honey. It won’t be very—

Child B: I WANT THE RUSTOS

Child A: How far is Dino Dental?

Me: Still pretty far but we can listen to a podcast once I get this—

Maps: PROCEED TO THE ROUTE

Child B: WHERE IS THE TRUSOS

Me: Do you mean Reese’s?

Child B: YES THE RACES

Child A: I DON’T LIKE RACES

*

Forty-five minutes later, one of them has taken a single bite of a grilled cheese and the other has eaten all the sweet potato chips that came with it. Each has devoured a Reese’s cup, adding chocolate to the berry juice on their faces, and expressed clear editorial disappointment that there are not more, owing to my shortcomings as a mother. No one has eaten a cherry. They’ve dropped the thermos on the floor in the back and I can’t reach it. The poop urgency has receded, but they are prowling the back seat desperately with hands and feet for something, anything, to do, since the bag of books I packed has also slid onto the floor and the toys have by now been abandoned. The anxiety about the appointment is mounting. I try to explain that it doesn’t hurt, that I will be there, that—

That’s when the thunder starts. Child A is petrified of thunderstorms. She herds everyone she can find into the house at the first sight of a cumulonimbus cloud, which she has learned about from her father. Now we are suddenly in the middle of a huge downpour, with lightning all around and thunder easily making it past the quiet of the electric car’s motor-whirr, and it is becoming clear to me that we will likely be exiting the car, once we arrive, into this lighting and thunder situation, with no umbrellas or raincoats, on the way in to the dentist appointment she already fears.

We do manage to get there, almost on time, and after causing several people to stand still in the rain while we overcome our fear enough to open the two doors you have to get through to get inside, my son bursts in to the quiet waiting room, dripping, and yells SEE IT’S NOT SO BAD! NOT SO BAD! for his sister, who is still halfway out the door, trailing off my hand. He begins sprinting back and forth to the receptionist desk, smacking its vinyl siding with a flat and very loud palm each time he arrives on the far end of our trajectory, while I coax his dripping sprite of a sister along one step at a time.

At the reception desk, there is an extremely well-eyebrowed young woman with an earpiece in who inquires with an eerie calm about our insurance, at which point I remember that MAYBE WE DO have some lame-ass-provisional-preventive-care-only-high-deductible dental insurance, and I fish around for and pull out two cards I’ve had in my wallet for six months that still have the “activate your online account here!” stickers on them, which I can’t get to peel off the front, so I start some stand-up comedy narrative for Eyebrows while I do scratch-off lotto-ticket stuff with the cards, dropping them and getting jarred by my haywire bumper car child at intervals while my reluctant faerychild works with tiny fingers to peel my body away from the desk so she can climb me like a tree frog.

Somehow I hand Eyebrows a partially un-stickered lame-ass-pseudo-insurance card while also trying to log into the system on my phone and activate the account. I get to the login page and run up against a password issue, so I call my husband, who is driving back from NYC on his return commute (he has driven 3300 miles this month so far). He is weaving between accidents and bumper-to-bumper swaths just outside the city, and he works to hold a conversation with me over spotty service, pausing to yell at other drivers and decelerate abruptly, while pulling up an account he doesn’t remember to get me a password he doesn’t know.

Eyebrows says with her AI-sounding calmvoice that she can inquire about the status of the activation on her end, and will I be comfortable proceeding with the appointments regardless of insurance status?

Well, we gotta do this, I mean, look at them, I say. Eyebrows looks at me blankly, but doesn’t have time to select a branch on her decision tree, because a hygeinist calls my children’s names from a door in the corner of the labrynthine waiting room, and my son is already barrelling at her towards a long hallway of rooms.

I pick up the treefrog and we follow as well, abandoning the conversation with Eyebrows, which isn’t really getting much traction anyway. I’m still on the phone with Dada, hearing bleeps and static and yelling and fragments of occasional muttered narration. Cigna… myCigna… username….

The hygeinist is bright and sunny and welcoming and enthusiastic and doesn’t seem cowed by my son’s energy so I let her manage taking him to a separate x-ray room while I sit on a mauve rolling chair with the treefrog, who has begun to tremble, on one of my knees, and the jumble of grating sounds that represent her father in my other ear. I apologize to the other hygeinist (by now Dino Dental has figured out that this crew is going to need more than one handler) for being on my phone, and she is gracious, and goes about her preparatory business.

Then someone makes the decision to allow us to sit unsupervised in a room full of machines, whereupon my son begins working the up-and-down foot-pedal of the hydraulic chair in a way that makes it sound and look like a carnival ride.

Try the usual password, my husband is saying over the car noise and bluetooth distortion. I ask him to confirm it and I yank stuff out of my purse to write it down, though I can’t hear him for sure, and a variety of items I don’t recognize fall out of my purse onto the floor.

Both hygeinists return, followed suddenly by the dentist herself, and everyone begins trying to get my son into the chair, which he has suddenly realized he is supposed to be in, rather than operating, which is a non-starter.

He has already talked them down to letting him “just sit” on the chair, “NOT lean back,” and is wearing the sunglasses they gave him on the back of his head, when I hang up with Dada and try the password he suggested. It doesn’t work. Treefrog is whispering fervent and specific, very imaginative concerns into my other ear.

The dentist is showing my son the polishing device on his tiny, dirty thumbnail, God bless her, when he decides to sit bolt-upright and yell DID YOU KNOW MY DENTIST APPOINTMENT IS ALMOST OVER??!! to the dentist sitting right next to him.

He continues to yell this question with a hybrid of aspirational joy and militant desperation at intervals over the next ten minutes, until he is actually done. By now, Treefrog is hyperventilating. I usher her to the chair and promise I will hold both her hands the whole time and that it won’t hurt.

Seven seconds into the polishing she begins to cry and whispers, across the most pathetic little deflating exhale I’ve ever heard, that she needs a break, which even the three efficient women looming above us can register and understand. They lean back for a moment while I lean in. The child won’t look up at me as I hold both of her clammy little hands, and as the tears roll down she manages to communicate that something is terribly wrong. What is it my love, I whisper into her ear, and she finally looks up at me, eyes shining with dread, and barely breathes, “There is sand in the toothpaste.”

Of all the things I failed to prepare her for, this is the worst, that toothpaste could feel like sand. I try to explain that that’s normal for this kind of toothpaste and that it will be very soon rinsed out; I try to usher her towards some kind of preemptive relief, when I realize that the next thing we’re going to have to help her through is the water hose and the sucker hose, which are about to come at her at the same time. They try to coach her, all at once, about the hose and the sucker, which are now in her trembling mouth, one from each side, and the terror in her face turns to a total blankness. She has left her body entirely.

Which is when her brother starts operating the carnival ride from underneath the chair, where he has crawled on his hands and knees while everyone was focused on sister.

Everyone yells at brother, which ensures that he will neither stop the ride nor emerge from his hiding spot, where no one can reach him. So they finish the rinsing and sucking on the zombie treefrog while her brother executes a rhythmic up-and-down on the foot pedal and I try to drag him out by the toe.

Eventually I remember to mention the PRIZE he’s going to get when we leave, and how he’d better get ready, which shoots him out of his havoc-cave by the foot-lever long enough to get distracted by something to do with a sink in the corner. Dada texts with a different password, which I type in while the dentist asks me pointed questions about what exactly brother is allowed to eat after he brushes his teeth. The password doesn’t work and the account is locked for too many login attempts. I confess the midnight unsweetened soymilk my son gets because he can’t sit still long enough to eat sufficient calories during the day; she wants to know yes but what kind of drinks are in the house in general and I say WATER MOSTLY WATER, hoping extra hard she can’t see the very bright visual of the apple cider on the bottom of the fridge door that’s in my mind, and she goes quiet for a while, as if trying to figure out how this is all possible. I know, I want to say.

I can see the gears in her head turning: the child in front of her, completely rigid in the carnival ride chair that has just stopped bucking, has… [I see it almost the exact moment it comes into her awareness]… perfect teeth. And this in spite of the fact [her head swivels to the urchin in the corner doing something to the sink] that the brother has… basically a mouthful of bones that resemble compost more than calcium.

I flash my eyebrows up and down at her when her gaze locks in on me.

“I farted,” my son says, from the corner, and smiles, showing the large cavity in his front tooth, which he inherited from his father, who also had compost-enamel in his baby teeth.

The dentist nods, as if this is the last action available to what’s left of her sense of agency, and finishes her job as best she can in silence while the hygeinists read bullet points aloud to me from a print-out about sedation for oral procedures, which the author of the fart is going to require in order for them to fit metal caps over his molars so the bones don’t turn to actual sand before he hits double digits.

I wrangle the children through the prize selection process which becomes more difficult with each second that we continue stand in front of the plastic toy bin because they are slowly realizing that the prizes are absolute bullshit, and have so little patience left after our adventures in the carnival chair that they can’t manufacture any cheerful acceptance at all. I try talking up a few of the pieces of shrink-wrapped junk and then realize I’m gaslighting my kids in a capitalist hellscape, which is only going to make them more outraged and tricky to get out of here, so I say “you know what? You’re right, these are kind of awful,” at which point we all sort of look at each other, shrug, and file out to see if we can shake the glow-stick hard enough to coax some feeble luminescence from it.

*

Somehow we all make it home. I eat the grilled cheese. Somehow their teeth are clean enough, though their faces are still purple and their nails still dirty. Somehow we go to bed.

I thumb through the photos on my phone in the dark and try to let a few soft and nourishing things from the week soak in, try to let myself be a giant sponge for the love I need.

I come across a picture I took of my daughter in her element, during her bath playtime, making artwork on a surface not typically used for artwork (my leg). She’s dreaming robustly and chattering brightly, as she paints, about the dearness of the beyond-fierce cheetah, her current favorite animal, because it can GO SIXTY TO SEVENTY FIVE MILES AN HOUR FOR THIRTY SECONDS BEFORE BECOMING COMPLETELY EXHAUSTED MAMA!

Beneath my family’s chaos-and-exhaustion fur, our difficult teeth and our insatiable bellies, there rests and pools a deep and steady hum, a sound I could hear well before my children were born. It is a thing so sure, so infinitely warm, it can’t be spoken.

Actually I fear even trying to speak these things at all, lest I rob them of one iota of their life-force.

But then I remember: that’s not how art works. It’s not taking something from here and putting it there. We’re just as much in the business of creating our lives as reporting them, with these efforts to see and feel them more clearly and fully. We run our small, damp hands over it all, sometimes searching and terrified, sometimes so assured our movements become flesh.

My daughter, in her delicate, robust wisdom, selects a lofty and brilliant blue for the toes of the cat.

Sky blue: of course.