Megan Again: The Tooth Of The Matter

Megan Again: The Tooth Of The Matter
By Megan Wirts

​When I was 9 years old I busted out my front tooth. It was my adult tooth.

I had just gotten it a couple years before when it arrived a while after its smaller predecessor had become tooth fairy fodder  so it was kind of bummer because it was so new. It happened at my grandparent’s house, in their basement while I was playing with my cousin. 

My grandparents lived on a dairy farm at the time and I loved being there. There were always so many fun things to do. You could climb trees or play in the barns. You could watch the cows being milked and best of all... 

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...you could feed the baby calves. It was also the place that we got to see our cousins.

​I loved playing with my cousins at my grandparent’s house. I grew up with cousins galore. The neighborhood where I lived  was teeming with a multitude of aunts, uncles and cousins. Not just 1st cousins, 2nd cousins or 1st cousins twice removed, if you want to be fancy about it, but 4th and 5th cousins were always around too.

My family likes to stay in one place, I guess. It was the greatest though. When you were at grandma’s house you knew you would always have someone to play with. It was never boring when the cousins were around.

We would play baseball, basketball and build amazing multi-layered and extraordinarily unsafe hay bale forts in the barn. Sometimes we could all go back to the creek behind their house and catch frogs or build tree houses. Looking back, I’m amazed any of us survived at all. We were daredevils and did some pretty stupid things like jumping through holes in the barn floor into piles of hay that had previously been used as a toilet. Gross, I know, but we didn’t care. We were having a freaking blast!

So, on the day that I busted out my front tooth, my cousin Jenn and I were in my grandparent’s basement. It was unfinished, had cement floors and included a pool table, a shower and the washer and dryer.

. It was dark and sometimes scary when the furnace would kick on and it sounded like a monster coming to devour a small girl like myself. Jenn and I were twirling around the poles that were in the middle of the basement singing the song, “Hey Baby” from Dirty Dancing. I was twirling, laughing and singing at the top of my lungs like I like to do, “HEEEEY, HEEEEY BABY! I WANNA KNOW-OW-OW-OW IF YOU’LL BE MY…” WHAM!!

I had tripped and smacked face first into the hard, cold cement busting out one of my front teeth. I sat up and started to cry. Jenn quickly, got my grandma and they gave me a wet washcloth with ice and my mom came to pick me up to take me to the dentist immediately.

When my mom arrived to pick me up I had stopped crying and hadn’t looked at myself in the mirror yet. My tongue told me the tooth had cracked in half, but I didn’t really know how bad it was yet. My mom asked me to move the wet wash cloth from my mouth so she could see it.

“OH MY, its terrible!”, she gasped when she saw the damage. This only led me to start crying more and wonder if I was ever going to be able to smile again!

My tooth had cracked right in half and was jagged and gnarly looking, and it hurt! I was not having a good day. Luckily, my amazing dentist got me in right away and patched it up nicely. His handiwork lasted 20 years until I had to finally have it replaced. Thank goodness for dental insurance.

So, out of all the crazy and dangerous things my cousins and I did while growing up on my grandparent’s farm, I bust out my tooth while singing and twirling around a pole. Which might have something to do with my aversion to strip clubs. Who knows?

Growing up surrounded by cousins was one of the best parts of my childhood. Every time I look in the mirror and see my fake front tooth, I think of all the fun we had over the years and how I’m lucky I got out of it with just one broken tooth. We have all grown up and many of us have families of our own now. Life gets in the way and we don’t get to see each other as often as we would like to, but when we do get together there is nothing like it.

We might not be jumping down holes in the barn floor anymore, thank goodness, but we still have our fun. We also still have our grandparents to visit, which we should all do more often.
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Myself included.