On the Firsts

One finds its way home

Hi, Friend.

If you’ve read my memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, you might remember the story of the loose tooth. If you haven’t read it, or if you’re thinking, “I don’t remember anything about teeth in that book,” here it is.

The Firsts

Violet lost her last baby tooth at her father’s house, a molar, which means I have all of her tiny, shell-sharp teeth in an earring box in my jewelry drawer, tucked in the way back, except one. And her father has a single molar of hers somewhere.

When he moved out of our house, he took essentials. He left behind the bird’s nest we found in the Christmas tree we had when our daughter was a newborn. He left behind family photos and the kids’ refrigerator drawings. There were things he left behind that I would’ve run into a burning house to retrieve. I’m attached to my children’s things, to the stuff of their childhood. Does this mean I’m motherly or simply nostalgic? Rhett now sleeps with the doll I had as a baby—Pink Baby. He loves the way her plastic face feels smooth and cool, separate from the softness of her stuffed body. I loved that, too, when I was a girl.

My bedroom dresser is covered with framed photos—my children mainly, but also my late grandmother, my dog, and one of me at age seven in my Brownie uniform. The frame is wood and bordered with popsicle sticks. My smile is part baby teeth, part adult.

I’m notoriously squeamish about loose teeth. Once, when the dentist pulled a very wiggly baby tooth for Violet, I was so lightheaded I half jokingly asked for a Sprite. I’ve happily relied on Mrs. Tyson, the school nurse, to snap on her gloves and yank out the ones that were so loose, my daughter couldn’t eat her lunch.

When Rhett’s first baby tooth was really loose, I was about to leave for a ten-day trip to LA, teaching for an MFA summer residency. I worried that my six-year-old might lose his first tooth while I was gone. I worried that my son’s first tooth fairy visit would be at a house my ex-husband had rented. I worried that I’d miss the first.

So I iced the tooth. I wiggled it around, then tried to pull it. Starting sweating a little. I wiggled it again wiggled. Iced again. Tried again. I realize how completely bizarre this sounds now, but at the time . . .

Dot dot dot.

My son’s tooth was still in his mouth when his father picked him up. It wasn’t ready to come out. It wanted to stay where it was.

Something “wanting to stay where it was” is a metaphor for how I now feel about writing about those hard years: I feel resistant to it, stubborn about it. I told the stories I wanted—needed—to tell, handling that material with as much care as possible, and now I want to set it down and write about other things. I don’t want to wiggle that particular tooth anymore. I want to let it be.

Those of you who have written about your lives—and those who haven’t, but who have been tempted to—can probably understand. But sometimes the material is just handed to you, and it would be even more unnatural not to write about it. Like trying to cement a baby tooth back into your mouth when it’s already fallen out. Sometimes you can’t go back.

A couple months ago, my children’s father visited from out of state and brought two big cardboard U-Haul boxes of their things with him—stuffies, artwork, journals, photos, tchotchkes. They went through everything, sorting it into two piles—things to keep, and things to throw away. They pitched more than they kept, but at one point my daughter came into my office and handed me something, a business-size envelope. On the outside was written, in her father’s unmistakable handwriting, “Rhett’s first lost tooth,” and it was dated: 7/3/19. I gasped. Inside the sealed envelope I could feel the tiny, hard tooth.

My daughter had no idea what the tooth meant to me, that it symbolized the first milestone I wasn’t present for. It wasn’t something I wanted to explain. It’s complicated. I’m both sad and happy that the tooth is back, five years later.

In 2019 we had no idea—any of us—what life would look like in 2024. The boy who lost that tiny tooth is now in middle school, and he’s turning twelve this month. He’ll be taller than me in another year, I think. I’m about to start teaching his sister—who is taller than me—how to drive.

They are becoming more and more their own, and less and less mine, every day—as it should be. And the firsts just keep on coming.

Take care—
Maggie