Dear Zianne,
Your teeth are too small.
Over the past few months your baby teeth have started to look out of place in your big girl body.
You get taller and taller and taller. You started wearing size 7/8 clothes before we even celebrated your fifth birthday.
Your hair gets longer and longer. Those vibrant blond strands, slightly curly, fall almost to your waist.
Your vocabulary gets bigger and bigger. I hear you uttering words like “apparently,” “tremendous,” and “spectacular” as you play with your toys.
You are a big girl by all definitions. You go to school five days a week. You stopped napping almost a year ago, and it’s taken me nearly that long to get through the personal trauma of surrendering that fixed, quiet time each afternoon. You get yourself dressed each day, and you seem to have a decent sense of fashion, which I hope you get from me. When I see you standing in front of the mirror each morning, gently brushing your own hair after years of fighting me about tangles, I catch a glimpse of teenage you. If I stare too long at your reflection, the image blurs into a 15 year-old getting ready for her first high school dance.
Then you smile your big, beautiful grin, and I almost laugh when I see the minuscule white teeth that dot your gum line. You are gorgeous, but your teeth remind me of a Picasso portrait — some abstract conglomeration of a young girl with a baby’s mouth.
They say the little years are fleeting. I know this to be true. We have celebrated five birthdays. We have captured all the important milestones on camera — first steps, first words, first day at school. We have faced challenges — a febrile seizure, potty training, finding the right childcare. Time is flying by…
I look at your tiny teeth and remember when the first one popped through. You were four months old and it ruined your sleep for a week. I tried all the remedies… Tylenol, natural teething gel, non-natural teething gel, my first encounter with essential oils. Did the lavender help you sleep at last or was it just the natural ending that you would finally sleep again after that little white tooth finally appeared?
You had a whole mouthful of teeth by ten months of age. “An early bloomer,” the pediatrician said. And then when you were two, you fell at the appliance store and chipped one of those front teeth. About a year later, around your third birthday, you chipped your other front tooth. We aren’t even sure how that one happened, which must be symbolic of how I’ve evolved as a mother. Nearly all parents are vigilant at first — carefully watching and recording the feedings, the diapers, the falls, the new words, but by the time the baby is three she can chip her tooth and you might not even know it. Instead of rushing to the dentist, you find yourself quietly thankful that the second chipped tooth makes the first one less apparent. The symmetry of chipped teeth seems quite practical. They will fall out soon enough anyway…
And now that time has come. I need your teeth to fall out now. It’s not that they are chipped. I don’t even notice that any more. It’s that they are too small. I am done with Picasso and want to move to Renoir – where young girls sit and play the piano with smiling adult teeth.
They say babies don’t keep. The say #stopgrowingup. They say the days are long but the years are short.
But I say, it’s time.
Those baby teeth don’t belong in your mouth anymore because you are not baby.
As bittersweet as it might be, the season of your babyhood has passed us by. Your baby teeth are a lingering remnant of a time that is no more. I can’t wait to see your gap-toothed smile as we venture into this next season of your childhood.
Love you forever,
Mama
