see how far we've come
go to the dentist
Last Thursday, I wrote it nonchalantly on the schedule, just below morning chores and breakfast.
The girls already knew. Riley pays attention to the calendar, had prayed about it the night before. Remembering the last visit—when the dentist pulled me aside right next to Zoe and told me two of her permanent teeth just weren’t there and wouldn’t be coming in, not ever–Zoe picked up on this line of thought and prayed too, asking “that everything might be okay with my teeth this time.”
That last time, I’d considered switching dentists.
“Does this guy even have kids?”
I remember thinking this while Zoe curled up in a ball on the red vinyl chair behind him, tears spilling down her cheeks, shaking, while he reassured me that the missing teeth were in the back. “She’ll probably just keep the baby teeth,” he’d said, “but we need to seal those. Because, if she loses those, there will just be gaps with nothing coming in behind them.” Empty holes. Not even the promise of anything else. There’s only been one forever empty that meant forever full, and that one an empty tomb, robbed forever of death.
“Zoe, it’s okay,” I said, touching her shoulder, moving around the dentist to her side. She just trembled, red-eyed, and buried her head in her hands.
He turned to her, surprised. “He doesn’t have kids,” I thought, wondering when it happened that half the professional people we see look twenty years younger than Kevin and me. Our favorite dentist now only performs dental surgeries at the hospital. This guy had only been with the practice a year. “Wait. What’s wrong?” He said to Zoe.
She just shook her head. I touched her shoulder again. “It’s okay. Honey, you can tell him.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head again, quickly. Her eyes said, I’m not talking to him.
I asked the question she had, knowing. “So, will it be noticeable, if she loses the baby teeth?”
“Oh, no,” he said, still looking at her, still surprised by her tears. She shook, her eyes buried, tucked away from him. “We can do some things to help—with orthodontia—to close in the gaps. And they’re in the back…so…no one will even know…Honey?”
He spoke to her again.
Honey?
“Sweetie?”
Sweetie?
“Why are you upset? Can you tell me why you’re upset?”
She shook her head again, tears still spilling.
“I think she’s just afraid,” I told him, interpreting. “Because you brought me back here, you know, used the words a bit concerned, unusual, missing, and never coming in. It seems like a big deal to her. I don’t think she knew until you told me.”
“Well, no,” he said, “I didn’t want to alarm her.” He turned to Zoe again, “Honey, it’s not common, but it’s something we’ve seen several times before. It’s okay. You just need to take extra good care of those teeth, because there’s nothing coming in behind them.” Again with the nothing. No possibility. Ever.
Zoe looked at me, her eyes screaming, “PLEASE.”
The dentist waved a hand dismissively toward Adam, already moving on. “We did the best we could with him. He let us clean his teeth, but…well, he didn’t really want us poking around in there much.”
“Okay, when I get home, I am asking friends about dentists,” I thought, but I said, “Well, I’m very proud of him. He used to to scream through dental appointments.” I had the feeling that the dentist had no time left for me, that he had tuned me out, didn’t care, but I pressed on. I had to. “I used to have to lay on top of him.” I said this a little too loudly, enunciating a little to purposefully, remembering the way I’d had to press my body out full length on top of my son, clinging to his kicking legs, while one hygienist held his arms, another his head. I still remember the ugly, clinical apparatus they’d used to pry Adam’s mouth open so that he couldn’t close it while the dentist’s fingers roamed inside, and me holding him, singing helplessly, trying to soothe. Adam would scream through those appointments, hysterical, betrayal torching his eyes as he looked at me. “You know that cartoon cat? The one with all its hair on end and its claws out?” I held my hands in front of me, fingers curved in, claw-shaped. The dentist said nothing. I saw no comprehension flash on his face. No smile. Nothing. Nothing save impatience. “Well, that used to be him,” I said, fruitlessly, gesturing toward Adam. “He’s done really well. We had to hospitalize him a few years ago—when he had a cavity. The fact that he can even be back here without me is…amazing.”
The words came out quickly, firmly, unbidden and unharnessed. I wanted this dentist to understand how much Adam had overcome. I wanted him to look at my son and see more than what remains lacking. I wanted him to catch just a glimpse of the possibility I see because of the long way we’ve come, to be patient, not to give up.
Really, it’s what every parent wants, this vision of possibility, the understanding of long roads traveled hard. Parents raising children with autism crave that recognition, search for it, share it eagerly. Our children look so normal, but they struggle so hard to communicate, to comprehend things gifted to the rest of us as instinct, to overcome anxieties and obsessions. What Zoe can learn in one conversation, Adam and Riley learn in thousands of repetitious lessons, complete with visual support. It takes us so long, but every step is a leap. And we’ve come such a long, long way together.
Every time I stand in the presence of someone who sees only what lacks, only how far we’ve yet to go, I feel it like a fist, punching and pressing, twisting right into my stomach. So many times, I’ve encountered people who think we’re not teaching our kids because it takes them such a long time to learn, because the signs of progress come so slowly. It takes us so long, but we’ve come so far together. I know it doesn’t matter really, that they don’t know. Only God’s opinions truly matter, and He knows. He brought us down this road, accomplishing everything. But it bruises to have so much hard work go unrecognized.
“Oh, I see patients who are like that all the time,” he said, dismissing my son again. “I don’t care how many patients like that you’ve seen,” I thought. “I had to lay on top of him. Now.I.don’t. He sits here by.himself. No kicking legs anymore, no.screaming.” I looked past him, not sure how much more I could take before I said something unkind, hasty, God-glory robbing.
But then the dentist moved on to Riley, who sat looking out the window, waiting. “And she’s old enough now for braces.”
“Braces?”
“Yes. Nothing serious, just cosmetic. I asked her if she wanted braces (Oh no.), but she said she didn’t know (Whew. Of course she doesn’t know. She probably can’t pull up a visual for ‘braces.’).”
“Does she need braces?”
“Well, she has a bit of an overbite…and…her teeth could stand to be more evenly spaced.”
I looked over at Riley. She felt my gaze and returned a tiny hi smile before her eyes flitted back to the window. Her teeth looked beautiful to me, straight.
“If you like, we can make her an appointment for a consultation,” he said.
“Um, I think we’ll have to think about that a bit first.” I gestured to Zoe, who had managed to pull herself together and sat red-eyed, blinking, still on the chair behind the dentist. I reached for Adam, who popped up immediately, ready to go.
“Come on, Rye,” I called toward the window, and we all left, sore.
In the hallway, Zoe unwound all over again, her voice quavering as she described the image in her mind that had appeared when the dentist started talking to me about her teeth. “I just—I’m just afraid I’m going to look hhhorrible!” The word poured out, a waterfall. “Everyone will laugh at me, Mom!” It shouldn’t matter, but we care what other people see, and the last thing we want them to see are empty, never-holes.
I pulled her into my arms and stood there in the hallway, rubbing her back, while Riley stood beside her, panicked, trying to dam the flood with words. Riley hates to see Zoe cry, had been too absorbed with the goings on outside the window to notice in the office. “Zoe. Zoe. Zoe, it’s okay, sweetie,” Riley stood there repeating, desperately, her hands flying up and out and back, as though she didn’t know what to do with them. Adam spun in circles next to the wall, synthesizing sounds with his tongue, things he heard outside. Then he’d get too far and come back to me, eyes searching my face briefly for signs that we could go. “oh my…my back hurts,” I realized, thinking about how I always pack my stress.
Finally, that day, I had gotten them to the car. All the way home, Zoe and I had discussed worrying about what other people think; crossing bridges when we come to them; how it really wasn’t the crisis she thought; while Riley interrupted to ask, “Mom? Why was Zoe crying?” and to say, “I don’t like it when Zoe cries.” And every time I’d turn down the radio so that I could hear something Zoe said, Adam would complain, his finger wiggling in the air, pointing to the stereo, his voice deep, “Uh, music please.”
So, no one dreaded last week’s dental visit as much as me.
I’d not gotten around to changing dentists yet. Around here, intention takes a while to ferment into action sometimes, even with genuine frustration mixed in to grow the yeast. I thought of this as I drove them, my finger tapping a rhythm on the wheel. I dreaded it. But first,
go to the dentist
casually written on the schedule. Adam noticed it when he got up and immediately started arguing with me about it, yet another sign of long roads traveled.
“No. No dentist today,” He said to me. He thrust his watch into my line of sight, to be sure I understood. “No 10:45 dentist.”
“Yes, Adam. We have to go to the dentist.”
“No!”
“Trust me, I understand. I don’t want to go either. But we have to go get your teeth cleaned.”
He made a sound, exasperated. “No clean teeth today.” Again the sound. “Zoe dentist. No Adam dentist today!”
Zoe looked up from where she sat at the table, eating her breakfast. “HEY! I don’t want to go either, Buddy,” she said to him. She looked at me. “Can you believe he said that?”
I laughed. “Yeah, he pretty much threw you under the bus.” I turned to Adam, who paced in front of the schedule. “All of you have to see the dentist.” I sighed. His features twisted. “No! No…no dentist today!”
“This is going to be one exhausting morning,” I thought, already expecting the worst. Face to face with all our lack, I couldn’t see the possibility.
But when the hygienist who took the kids back came out that morning, he smiled. “Everything went really well today. No cavities. And I looked, and it looks like I’ve had Adam the last few times he’s been in here.”
“Really? Well, that’s probably good. That he knows you.”
“Yeah. I really like Adam. He’s a cool kid. He did a really, really good job. We even got x-rays (the last time they’d been able to get x-rays, Adam had been asleep in the hospital).”
Excitement. I saw excitement on the hygienist’s face. I’d had to look more closely. I hadn’t expected it. He’s proud of my son. He sees. He knows.
And when I walked back with the hygienist this time, I walked back to meet a new dentist. All the way home, while Zoe told me about how the man working with Adam had been so good with him, so patient, talking to Adam the whole time he worked, Riley asked me a thousand different questions about what had happened to the other dentist. “Where did he go, Mom?” And I just kept thinking about the difference in two men, one seeing lack, another progress.
And I wondered, “Does God feel bruised when we look at each other and only see what lacks? Does He want to press past our callousness with stories of progress and hard work and ‘please, please-don’t-give-up-on-my-child’ possibility? ‘But wait. I used to have to watch her cry for hours in the dark. She used to…but now she…she’s come so far. And it’s amazing.'”
Just weeks ago, I asked a hurting friend how I could help her through a particularly hard time. And she said, “When you notice a way that I’ve grown, please tell me. Tell me the ways you can see that that I’ve changed, that things are different. I need to know that all this struggling is really worth it, that God is making progress with me.”
Thinking of her this morning, I smiled, gazing at double amaryllis blooms in pots by the window in my living room. When I’d planted them, those ugly bulbs in wicker baskets, they’d been nothing to see. Just three pots of wet dirt, a rough brown stem jutting up in the middle, a pile of moss curling from the top of each. But I’d watched them for weeks, expecting beauty, enthusiastic for the possibility of everything happening beneath the soil. In the darkness, for days, beauty rooted deep. Then the stem, the bud, the full, rich bloom, petals like ruffles. My friend had only asked that I see the signs of the beauty accomplished in her, that I speak of them.
This, I realize, has to be what God wants us to see in each other. Not the lack. Not how far we’ve yet to go, but how far we’ve come. The possibility. The progress. The long way already traveled. And when I dismiss the possibility in the face of lack, the Holy voice presses past my callouses, proud, to tell me all that has been accomplished already. Because when I look at you, when I speak of you, the only empty I’m meant to see is a death-robbed tomb, the forever-full.
And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here (2 Corinthians 5:15-17)!
