Dogtooth

Life pushes through with no rehearsal

My teething watercolor study

God brought me art and my Greek husband. In high school I checked out a DVD from the Bozeman library, a Greek film called Dogtooth (Κυνόδοντας) which went something like this: A young woman held captive by her parents is told she can never leave until she loses her adult canine teeth (which of course will never happen); after enduring bizarre familial torture she smashes out her cuspids in the bathroom sink. Dogtooth left a scar on my heart. It was beautifully shot, disgusting and depraved like a Hellenic Salò, and vindicated my decision to legally separate from the burning car crash of my family.

How wonderful that this Greek art film came into my life at a crucial adolescent time and then I later met a Greek filmmaker I would love and marry (he also loves Dogtooth and the films of Yorgos Lanthimos)— for this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago! We can follow the synchronous threads and make meaning of the world, or we can be crushed by its jaws and spat out.

Teeth are also a living metaphor for how we chew the world up and send it into our bodies (or spit it out). Until about two weeks ago my 18-month-old daughter had only four teeth; the rest have since begun to erupt. I suspected as much after an inflammatory recalcitrance took over her normally peaceful demeanor and a small red rash bloomed on her cheek. She wailed and grabbed her gums, but no visible drooling accompanied what I thought was a teething rash. At an enormous wedding rehearsal dinner on Long Island, some well-meaning older Greek women in the family proposed the cheek redness may be contact dermatitis or a gluten allergy.

Dogtooth, a film by Yorgos Lanthimos

The idea of my daughter suffering from a preventable, autoimmune-y skin ailment was a microdose of insanity for me. She was born through the birth canal at home and breastfed exclusively, she drinks raw milk and kefir and still nurses. I had no good evidence she was allergic to anything. I refused to believe it. Maybe her tiny biome was just unprepared for the dank, fungal terrain of New York. Transitory teething rash without excessive drool remained my working hypothesis for a week. The homeopathic remedy Chamomila 30c continued to help soothe baby’s out-of-character tantrums.

A week after the fleeting rosy patch on her cheek appeared and then mysteriously disappeared (was it thanks to the German Calendula cream I bought at the Waldorf school farm store??), I poked her gums with my fingernail and immediately registered THREE new teeth barely poking through the surface. I was completely right that she was not celiac or in a state of gut dysbiosis, just teething.

Rudolf Steiner theorized that babies are not born with teeth because they have just come down from the angelic realm and have no need for them or the forces necessary to deal with earthly substance. A child’s first teeth represent the necessary “hardening” of the new human being into the physical realm, in order to navigate and thrive in the material world.

I had a mystical theory that my daughter spent most of her first year on earth still very much connected to the angelic realms and that’s why her teeth have taken so long to appear. She did inherit my shocking meat tooth, though, and has torn through impressive amounts of steak and chicken with just her gums and a few tiny teeth.

After fleeing New York for Montana in 2020, my right bottom gum swelled with an excruciating jaw pain that would weirdly share the radiating, pulled-apart feeling of giving birth years later. Naturally I thought I was dying and kept calling dentists and periodontists for emergency appointments but they were all locked down. I was instructed to get antibiotics at the ER. One week later, one third of my wisdom tooth erupted.

There are two beautiful gold crowns in my mouth that I paid three thousand dollars for in 2021, after I failed (for four years) to address two poorly executed and cracked fillings. I now care religiously for my teeth, and pray they last as long as my grandfather’s (fifty years). I have not had cavities in over half a decade since quitting smoking, following the dietary principles of Weston A. Price and reading the Nadine Artemis book Holistic Dental Care, a very practical guide to self-dentistry.

No less than five dentists have shared with me their standardized American recommendation that everyone have their wisdom teeth surgically removed, but I never forgot the girl at my Montana high school who died from brain sepsis after her routine wisdom teeth removal. I think it’s better not to have surgery if you don’t actually need it.

At six months pregnant I went in for a teeth cleaning and kept almost fainting and throwing up after they had me laying on my back in the dentist chair like a captive seal who shouldn’t be there. I’m pretty sure pregnant women aren’t supposed to lay on their backs.

Can’t stop thinking about this Andrew Wyeth egg tempera painting

Two months postpartum at the second cleaning appointment, I refused X-rays, fluoride toothpaste, and a referral for wisdom teeth removal. The glowing/kind middle-aged Mormon hygienist whispered to my wide open mouth while scraping off molar tartar that she saw no evidence of a jaw too small for its wisdom teeth. They were not impacted and caused me no pain, but strangely the wisdom tooth had revealed more of itself while I was pregnant. It was now halfway out.

This week after I found my daughter’s brand new teeth and received planet-shattering news that would move my family to the desert, my wisdom tooth began hurting again. Maybe I was getting sick or inflamed, since these teeth can cause problems during times of crisis or great change. They are also linked to reactions of the immune system. Once again, though, there was no abscess. Two days later the wisdom tooth was entirely birthed out from my gums. My daughter and I had been teething at the same time.

I drew my daughter during breakfast one morning while she was teething

Donkeys also have wisdom teeth. We take in a lot of life through these granite-hard, delicate pillars of silica, so I try to care for them by consuming: raw milk, cod liver oil, a lot of elk meat, parmesan cheese, nettles, beans, and avoiding too many glutinous or sugary things aside from milk chocolate to which I am undoubtedly a slave. Nursing women especially need a heap of calcium and fat-soluble vitamins in order to keep their hair, nails, and teeth from literally falling out.

The springtime petrichor of upstate New York combines with a wall of birdsong every morning before dawn. The threat of tick-borne autoimmune illness continues to torment me but I’ve resolved not to project any fear of nature or illness onto my daughter. I personally stay off the grass and opt for higher altitude trails, where there is very little for deer and rodents (the tick vectors) to eat. I recommend the book Healing Lyme Disease Naturally by one of my favorite ethnobotanists, Wolf Storl. He implores that, despite illness, we must not to retreat from wild nature to our own indoor hell of computers and artificial light. The cardinals here are so beautiful that I’m considering painting songbirds and the moon like Ann Craven.

Ann Craven’s cardinal

Next week I will go see Hilma Af Klint’s botanical and anthroposophic watercolors at MoMA and of course The Met’s huge Sargent show. I can hardly wait and couldn’t ask for two better summer exhibitions. I will enjoy summer in New York. Warping my Navajo loom for the third time has been one of the more excruciating endeavors of my life, but after a lot of trial and error and blood and tears it is almost finished. Like a sizable majority of weavers before me I will devote the coming months to experimenting with plant dyes, ideally green ones.

Some facts I have accepted in May: The life force of spring is unstoppable and very green. Learning to occupy the spiritual realm while rending unto Caesar what is Caesar’s is an art. Sometimes growth feels like inflammation until something breaks through.

We only get two sets of teeth in our lifetime. We should care for them. Every decision we make moves us toward or away from health. There is no rehearsal for life. I remember this when I don’t want to run or feel too tired to work on a watercolor at the breakfast table: “Human life only occurs once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.” (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)