You've Got To Brush Even Baby Teeth Every Day, You Know

A few days ago, the baby produced his first tooth. It was like watching the volcanic formation of a new island chain: In the morning, he had no tooth at all on his little wax-pink gums. Then suddenly in the afternoon, there it was, as cheerful and as clear as dammit, poking just over his bottom lip, a ridiculous little nubbin of perfectly useless tooth. We were all beside ourselves, it was so ludicrous. It was as if the baby had put a little hat on his head, picked up a lunch pail, and announced he was heading down to the mill. A few times an hour, at least, Lily or Grace or I will draw the family’s attention back to the subject of the baby’s tooth — “Look at his tooth,” which we were probably already looking at anyways, in stunned amazement. There it is; there it must be looked at. I imagine woolly mammoths did much the same thing when a new glacier arrived in the neighborhood, saying “Will you look at that” not so much because nobody was looking at it, but because everybody already was, and that sort of thing requires frequent acknowledgement. Will you look at that. A tooth in a baby’s mouth. Likely place for it to be, and yet what an unexpected development just the same.

What is he supposed to do with a tooth? Not a blessed thing. He might as well have grown a coffee grinder or a pencil sharpener, for all the use he can get out of it. He’s only just figured out what to do with his neck, and even that’s not 100% yet.

But we’ve got to do something about it. As soon as your baby gets teeth¹ you’re supposed to start brushing them — never mind that he can use them to chew precisely nothing. They’re purely ornamental at this point. But brushed they’ve nevertheless got to be, and that twice a day, just as faithfully as if his diet consisted of old bread and boiled turnips, even though in reality he lies around drinking milk all day, like if Caligula were also Amish. So to that end we have purchased a little donut-shaped baby toothbrush, which we dutifully dampen with water and drag over the quarter-inch surface of teeth he’s got in his mouth every morning and evening.² His teeth do not toil; neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like these.

One of the most splendid things, incidentally, about a little baby is that they wake up about five hundred times a day. Over and over again they wake up. It’s wonderful to get to greet a little well-rested creature suddenly restored to agreeable consciousness. “Good morning,” you get to say again. “Hello, and good morning,” again. “Time to start the day,” as a little fat face breaks into a wreath of smiles beneath your own.³

They say you’re supposed to spend two minutes on each toothbrushing session, but I don’t see how we could possibly spend a full minute on each tooth. They’re not even all the way up yet. If his mouth were a toaster oven, the visible part of his teeth is just the tops of the crust. That’s what is really marvelous about baby teeth, I think; they’re perfectly miniaturized and correct and immaculately useless at the same time, like Royal Doulton figurines, but you’ve nonetheless got to take them just as seriously as if they were your own, like a Royal Doulton figurine with a job. Looking after a baby, your day is riddled with silly little jobs. How silly, how nice. I never had a baby before this, and I lived thirty-seven years in the world before I came to know this one, so it’s all very agreeably novel.

I like being one of the stewards of his baby teeth. They’re only practice ones, anyhow, so even if we accidentally scrub them out of his head, he can always grow new ones. Babies are practical like that. They come out prepared for anything and ready for nothing, bless them.

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1. A second tooth followed the first the very next day; if current trends persist, this boy is going to be mostly teeth before the end of the month.

2. The jury seems split on whether he’s too young for baby toothpaste or not, so we occasionally add a whisper-sized daub on the bristles and add that to the mix. Purely a formality, you understand. Like a faded Southern dowager in a Tennessee Williams play who insists on observing the old customs from the long-vanished days of plenty. “We know it does no good, but it helps the poor dear, you know.”

3. Sometimes the little fat face is shouting at you, of course. But seven times out of ten he wakes up pretty pleased with himself, and the rest of the time he can usually be coaxed into laughter by saying something with a plosive “Buh” or “Duh” sound, vaudeville be damned.