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                              Brace yourself.

BRACE YOURSELF

The Orthodontist's Solution

"Methubabuubble."

"What?" Lilac passed me in the hall. I could tell her lips were moving, but
she might as well have been telling me to "Kiss the salamander" in Gaelic.

"METHUbabubble!"

I smiled benignly and patted her arm.

"That's nice, dear."

Life at our house has been different since Lilac got braces. For one thing,
it took weeks before I understood a thing she said. The pile of used wads
of chewing gum at the bottom of the wastebasket has been cut by nearly
half. And every six weeks, after tightening day, I have to come up with
three days' worth of meals with the consistency of wallpaper paste.

There's been a financial adjustment, too. Until now, everything we' ve
spent on our children has been fairly tangible, like footie pajamas and
trick doorknob covers. Now we're shelling out a sizable wad every month for
something we can barely see, don't understand and have virtually no chance
of selling later at a garage sale. Its like making a car payment, except
that you pay for the car piece by piece, as it's being assembled. To make
matters worse, after the two to three years it takes to finish the car, it
will be driven by someone else who soon will no longer be parking in your
garage.

It's not like this is our first trip around the block, either. Lilac had
braces in first and second grade, to correct a gap between her front teeth
big enough to strain citrus pulp. So when we went in for the
post-baby-teeth checkup at 13, I was confident she'd need a tuneup, at
best. Instead, a man in a white coat with serious eyes began opening and
closing a plaster set of my daughter's teeth and using phrases like "lower
jaw growing larger," "catch it in time" and using a "saw. " Still reeling
from the spectacle of my child's teeth operating independently of her head,
I managed to catch something about the "orthodontic solution, " which,
naturally, was "our decision."

It was a tough choice. On one hand, we had a lovely young girl with
perfectly adequate-looking teeth who would soon be requiring vast sums of
money to live on a college campus and call home collect. On the other,
there was the Jay Leno syndrome, my moth-er, and the possibility that we
would have to eat Thanksgiving dinner across the table from a woman who
looked like a bulldog for the rest of our lives.

We bit.

Complex negotiations began between our insurance company and the
orthodontist, to see who would pay for what. It was almost like buying a
40-inch big-screen TV from ABC Warehouse. We got a payment schedule, a
payment book, a manual and stern warning that "appliances must be used only
as instructed."

At her first "fitting," Lilac was enthusiastic. After all, her teeth didn't
fit together. It was annoying. And everybody else had braces, didn't they?

By visit three, we were ruining her life. She could hardly talk, a real
liability for a person who ran home from the bus stop every day to phone
the people she'd been at school with for six hours. Brace- tightening
involved pain. Her lips didn't fit anymore. Every once in awhile, I'd look
over and see her face in a grimace that looked like the aggression ritual
of the Outer Gambongo Baboon. She was just trying to keep her lips from
catching on her teeth.

The effect wasn't quite what she had in mind. "I look like a thark, " she
moaned. "I look thtupid!"

Frankly, it was hard to be sympathetic. After I'd given up all hope of ever
having a matching dining room set to keep her from looking like Mary Anne
the steam shovel, she was acting as if we were sending her to boarding
school on Mars. It was all I could do to keep from lecturing that in my
day, we had to wear an orthodontic device that made us look like we were
ready to pull the wagon in the Budweiser commercial.

But gradually she adjusted, thanks to orthodontic wax, which she lodges in
her mouth in large enough quantities to fashion a credible likeness of
Charles DeGaulle.

I've adjusted, too -- to the little rubber bands she leaves on the edge of
her plate and the idea of giving a teen-ager a $200 appliance that must be
removed at meals and fits nicely inside a crumpled napkin.

The other day, I took my 7-year-old son to have his teeth cleaned. The
dentist frowned. "Looks like he's got a problem up here ," he said. "Better
send him over to the orthodontist."

Let's see: Only 11 years, 76 payments and 37,000 rubber bands to go.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Diane Burton Robb

~~~~~~~~

By Diane Burton Robb Diane Burton Robb, our award-winning humor columnist,
lives in Holland. She has been a stupor mom so long, we decided to make her
a contributing editor.

Copyright 1995 by Gemini Publications. Text may not be copied without the
express written permission of Gemini Publications.

Robb, Diane, Brace yourself.., Vol. 7, Grand Rapids Parent Magazine,
03-01-1995, pp 19.