I Avoided the Dentist for Nine Years, and My Six-Year-Old Was Braver Than Me

The wobble I told nobody about

I noticed it on a Sunday, biting into a green apple in my kitchen in Boksburg, and I did the thing that a certain kind of man does. I pretended it had not happened.

One of my back teeth, lower left, had a give to it. A tiny movement, the sort you can only feel with your tongue if you push. So I stopped pushing. I ate on the right side. I told myself it was nothing, probably the apple, probably the cold water, probably anything except the truth, which was that I had not sat in a dentist's chair in nine years and my gums had been quietly telling me about it the whole time.

I want to be honest about why I stayed away for nine years, because I think a lot of men will recognise it. It was not the money, not really. It was not the time. It was a small, stupid, boyish fear that I had never grown out of, and a pride that would not let me admit to the fear. Every year I did not go made it harder to go, because now there would be a lecture, now there would be a list of things wrong, now the not going was itself something to be ashamed of. So I built a wall out of avoidance and I lived behind it, brushing quickly, flossing never, chewing on the right.

The bathroom mirror, and the blood

The gums had been bleeding when I brushed for longer than I would like to admit. Pink in the sink. I had decided, in the way you decide these things at half past six in the morning, that bleeding gums were normal, that everyone's did that, that it meant I was brushing hard enough.

It does not mean that. I know that now. Bleeding gums are your body knocking on the door.

What finally moved me was not the wobble and not the blood. It was my daughter.

She is six. She had a check-up coming up, her first proper one, at a practice a colleague had recommended because they were good with small children. My wife could not take the morning off, so it fell to me. And I realised, standing in the kitchen holding the appointment card, that I could not sit in a waiting room encouraging my child to be brave about the dentist while I had spent nine years being a coward about it myself. Children can smell that kind of hypocrisy. They cannot always name it, but they smell it.

The dinosaur shirt

She wore her dinosaur shirt because she had decided dinosaurs were brave. She held my hand in the car and asked me, in the way children ask the exact question you are dreading, Daddy, does it hurt.

And I said no, because I did not actually know, because I had been hiding for nine years. I said no and I hoped I was not lying.

The place they sent us to was calm in a way I had not expected. The person who saw her, a kids dentist who clearly did this a hundred times a week, spent the first few minutes not looking in her mouth at all. She showed my daughter the little chair that went up and down, let her hold the mirror, counted her teeth out loud like it was a game, and called the water sprayer a tickle. My daughter, in her dinosaur shirt, was magnificent. She lay back. She opened wide. She did not cry. She got a sticker and a tiny toothbrush and she walked out of there believing, genuinely, that the dentist was a nice place where you got prizes.

I watched all of this from the corner chair feeling roughly two centimetres tall.

When she asked about my mouth

While my daughter was choosing her sticker, the dentist glanced at me, friendly, and asked when I had last been in. And instead of the smooth lie I had ready, something in me gave up the pretending. I said nine years. I said I had a tooth that moved and gums that bled and I had been too much of a coward to come in.

She did not lecture me. That was the thing that undid me. She just nodded, as if half the adults she met were carrying exactly this, which they probably are, and she said it sounded like something worth looking at properly, and that if the movement and the bleeding had been going on a while, I might need to see a periodontist, a specialist in the gum and bone that hold the teeth in place, rather than just a filling and a wave goodbye.

I booked myself in. I did it right there at the desk, quickly, before the coward could talk me out of it, while my daughter showed the receptionist her sticker.

What nine years had cost

The specialist appointment was humbling in the way that seeing the truth always is. The wobble was not the apple. The bone around that lower left tooth had receded from years of gum disease I had felt every morning in the sink and chosen to ignore. The tooth could not be saved. I had, through nothing but avoidance, thrown away a tooth that a scared version of me had condemned nine years earlier.

That was the hard part to sit with. Not the treatment, the arithmetic. If I had walked in at year one, or year three, or even year five, that tooth would still be mine. My cowardice had a physical cost and I was now looking at it on a screen.

They talked me through what came next, gently, and it turned out that losing the tooth was not the end of the story the way I had feared. The gum disease had to be brought under control first, which took a few visits and a great deal of me finally learning to floss like an adult. Once the foundation was healthy again, one of the options for the gap was dental implants, where a post is placed into the bone to hold a replacement tooth, so that eventually you would not know, looking at me chew a green apple, that any of this had happened.

The thing my daughter taught me

I am part way through it as I write this. The gap is still there. I have learned to say the word implant without flinching, which for me is progress. My gums do not bleed in the morning any more, and I notice that absence every single day, a small quiet victory in a bathroom sink.

But the real change is not in my mouth. It is that I no longer teach my daughter one thing while doing another. When she goes for her next check-up she will know that Daddy goes too, that Daddy sits in the chair, that the grown-up rule and the child rule are the same rule.

She still thinks she was the brave one that day, in her dinosaur shirt, showing me how it was done. She is right. She was. A six-year-old walked into a room I had been running from for nine years and treated it like an adventure, and in doing so she embarrassed me, kindly and completely, into finally looking after myself.

I tell other men this now, the ones who go quiet when the dentist comes up, the ones eating on one side and pretending. The bleeding is not normal. The wobble is not the apple. And the longer you hide from it, the more it costs you, in teeth and in the small shame of being outdone by someone half a metre tall in a dinosaur shirt.