I have been trying to re-regulate all afternoon. With little to no success. Maybe I am premenstrual or maybe all of these feelings today are simply too big for my body. At any rate, shit is stirred up and here I am.
I took Freddy to the dentist this morning. Our 3rd attempt. We went to a more pediatric specific practice and while they didn’t have TVs on the ceilings (Madison Children’s Dental, I miss you) they did a better job at making some inroads with our guy. Which essentially means he only slid off the big chair and scooted toward the exit once, and only spent maybe 50% of the visit hiding under my chair. They did not clean his teeth perse, but they were able to take a look and poke around a squidge, just enough to let me know what I need to pay extra attention to.
I don’t really know why Freddy is so nervous about the dentist. He hasn’t had any adverse experiences. He has watched everyone in his family get their teeth cleaned at least once. All super chill. I do, however, know exactly why my cortisol is through the fucking roof when we visit the dentist, and exactly why his resistance to it is so hyper-charged for me.
If you dig way back into the histories of this blog- sorry again for the lack of any labels good grief- I am pretty sure you will come across some accounting of what the first five years of parenting was like for us through the lens of Maple’s and Eider’s teeth. It was extreme my dudes and even though all is well now and both of those teens have absolutely incredible teeth in their mouths, there is substantial traumatic residue from those years of struggling with baby teeth that were simply and unstoppably crumbling away. It was a battle against persistent and extreme decay, repeated dental procedures involving full anesthesia on more than one occasion for each kid. In an effort to avoid that outcome, we even subjected Eider to a wakeful forced restraint on a papoose while his front four teeth were capped. Do we regret that? Um, 100%. In an effort to avoid a shitty experience, we probably manufactured a worse one. Oh parenting, you deceptive bitch.
It was a nightmare. The whole thing. And it was absolutely the lens that filtered most if not all of the choices that we made for both kids through early childhood. We took extreme dietary measures, visited all sorts of specialists and witch doctors. We even did curative eurythmy… if any of y’all have even heard of that.
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I took a step away from this for a bigger moment to myself. I went to the gym and threw heavy shit around and reconnected to my strength inside of my softness. It was very helpful. I was able to come home to a pretty demanding toddler and engage him with my whole heart through bath and bedtime. And now, another day. Great new is that I don’t have to travel back to the dentist with him for another six months and hopefully the imprint of yesterday will be enough to bolster him into the chair and toward a proper cleaning next time. I hope so anyway. And it is also ok if not. He is doing ok. Fortunately, so are his teeth relative to what his big brother and sister endured through their early years.
But I kinda have to wonder, and I imagine that you may be guessing at this as well, has he inherited some of this dental wound through them or me or both? He wasn’t there, but he is such a deep part of each of us and there is a way in which the boundaries of time and space dissolve inside of that kind of intimacy. Or is it just that the scars I carry from that era are so deep that there is simply no way that it doesn’t impact today?
Anyway. I think that is all that I want to say about it for now. I am back on my bullshit today and all of the stress hormones have been released for the time being. I can focus on fun today, and the silly little idiosyncrasies that make up my days with Freddy.
Here are a few that you should know:
Freddy (which is already a nickname for Wilfred) has given himself an additional nickname and refers to himself this way almost exclusively. He calls himself BaBa after the baby brother puffin on Puffin Rock. Our guess as to how he settled on this particular name has something to do with the two repeated syllable nicknames that Maple and Eider have. Maple has long been moo moo, and when Freddy was wee he began calling Eider doo doo (ha ha ha sorry Eid. jk he loves it. Plus, it’s dude for short(er)). So, makes reasonable sense that he would need his own similar name and baba it is! In Maple’s words, nicknaming yourself is such a Leo thing to do. Lol.
Also, Freddy is obsessed with what he calls “race tunes”, or music to listen to when he rides his bike around the house, ideally being pursued by one of the kids or Chris on the scooter. His preferred race tunes, and the ones we listen to no less than 3 times through every single day are Cake’s greatest hits. Beginning with The Distance and working our way through from there. If you are curious just check out Cake on Spotify and you will immediately be living inside the soundtrack of our life currently. It could be worse. And yet, a change would be great! Lol.
Anyhow, he is funny and quirky and I am grateful to know him and love him and for as long as he wasn’t part of our constellation there is a bigger part of him that always was. So, who knows, maybe he really carries those older stories someplace inside of him too. Maybe.