Summary of Carry On, Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life - Book Summary (2016)

Part III. MULTIPLYING

Chapter 27. Transcendentalist

One November morning, my children were very, very bad—due to the Halloween candy sugar-high, obviously. After lunch, I insisted that their teeth were going to fall out and they could have no more candy ever, ever, ever. The problem is that I love candy. So I told them not to eat it and I hid the stash, and then throughout the day, I ate it. Later, as I was putting the clothes in the dryer, I found a pack of mini-Twizzlers in Chase’s pocket. They were all gummy and jacked up from going through the wash, but this was not a strong deterrent. Because: Twizzlers! I ripped the package open and started chewing. Joy.

But then I bit down on something hard. Weird. I examined the messy gob and found a tooth in it. A TOOTH. Upon second glance, I realized it was one of my crowns. I was terrified. It was like having one of those dreams in which your teeth are falling out and you wake up so relieved it was just a dream except that my teeth were actually falling out. No waking up. Tish walked in and I showed her the tooth, and she started crying. I thought she was worried about me, but no. Not Tish.

Tish: What’s that red stuff in that tooth? Are you eating candy without me????

Me: Yes, Tish. I was.

Tish: And your tooth fell out???

Me: Yep. I told you.

Tish: Uh-oh. We better ask Google what we should do.

Google is her third parent. Actually, it may be her first parent.

So I ran to the computer and entered: What do I do if my crown falls out? Got some good info. Thank you, Mama Google.

I took Mama Google’s advice and made an appointment to get the crown replaced. I made sure to schedule it during the day so I could get a sitter and avoid telling Craig about the debacle. I cannot talk to my husband about the dentist. Craig is a total dental goody-goody. He goes to the dentist every six months, on the dot, and he flosses every day. Twice a day, often. I do not floss. I have no idea why not. I can do hard things, but not this easy thing. I’m too tired. This makes Craig insane. He leaves dental floss by my toothbrush every night. He sends me annoying links about gum disease. He buys me fresh toothbrushes every few months. He panics every time I open a package with my teeth. It’s exhausting.

When I say that Craig is the poster boy for dental hygiene, I mean it literally. There is a mammoth poster of him on the wall at our local dentist, smiling his huge lily-white, healthy gummed smile, mocking all of us terrified, sweating, miserable anti-­dentites. The entire dental staff adores Craig, and he loves them right back. He gushes about them while I glare at him. When he visits, they treat him like their son who’s just come home from college. They ooh and aah. When I visit, they just eeewww. They raise their eyebrows. They look at my bleeding gums and then shoot each other glances and say to me, “You’re not flossing. You’re still not flossing.” And then they pull out the dental floss and offer me a lesson. Every time, another flossing lesson. Like I’m five. And the thing is that I have to listen and pay attention and act like it’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone floss because my only other alternative is to say, “JESUS—I KNOW how to floss, I JUST CHOOSE NOT TO.” Which seems worse. So like an idiot, I watch them carefully and I say, “Ooooh, I see. That’s how it’s done. I use the floss on my teeth. Aaah … That’s where I went wrong. I was using it on my elbow … I see now. Aha. Yes. I see. Looks fun!” It is always so uncomfortable and infuriating and humiliating that when I leave, I vow to floss every day. But then I don’t. Because I get tired again.

The kids’ dental appointments are different. I really like taking the kids to the dentist. We go to a dentist who’s discovered that if you turn the office into an amusement park with movie screens and air hockey tables and video games kids will actually WANT to get cavities and JACKPOT! I’ll take it, though. It’s like Disneyland minus the walking around plus a Keurig machine and up-to-date People magazines.

As a bonus, I feel like a responsible grown-up at the kids’ dentist. What kind of mom remembers to bring all three of her kids to the dentist? An amazing one, that’s what kind. And so I walk around that office feeling very fancy and efficient. I always wear a cardigan to the kids’ dental appointments. I only own one cardigan, because I’m not really the cardigan type. But on dentist day, I sure am. Nothing says responsible and OBVIOUSLY I’VE NEVER SPENT TIME IN JAIL DON’T BE RIDICULOUS like a cardigan does.

The sugar-free icing on the cake is that Craig the dental nerd makes our kids brush and floss twice a day, so they always get perfect dental reports. And since I’m the one who takes them to their appointments, the dentist thinks I’m the responsible dental parent and always congratulates me. Hah!

I once took the kids to a hotel without Craig, and at bedtime I had to tell the three of them that I forgot all of their toothbrushes. They turned WHITE (to be clear, my kids are half Asian, so they’re usually brown). These children were horrified. When I went into the bathroom to wash up, Tish found my cell phone, hid in the corner, and CALLED CRAIG TO RAT ME OUT. I heard her whispering furtively, “Daddy—Mommy said to go to bed without brushing our TEETH. What should we do, Daddy?” I ran out of the bathroom and yelled, “TISH! OH MY GOD,” and Tish whispered back into the phone, “I have to go, Daddy, ’cause now Mommy’s screaming bad words at me.”

The next day when we got home, Craig started to say, “What the …” but I said DON’T EVEN. And he didn’t even.

The point is, I’m bad at teeth cleaning, but I do use tooth whitener religiously. So when I get the kids’ glowing teeth reports, I flash the hygienists my glowing smile and nobody’s the wiser. In short, I get to be somebody else for a while—a dental nerd in a cardigan with perfectly groomed children—and I really enjoy playing that role for an hour or two. On dental mornings I become my own character foil.

One morning the kids had appointments scheduled, so I pulled on my cardigan, and we piled into the van. Unfortunately, I realized a few seconds later that I had forgotten to feed them breakfast. Usually I keep a dozen energy bars in the car for moments such as these, but on this day, I looked into the glove compartment and realized there was only one bar left. And I was starving. So obviously I told the kids there were no bars left and Amma was MAD, but what else is new? At the light, I turned up the music so they couldn’t hear the wrapper, and I scarfed down that bad boy.

We arrived at dental Disneyland, and I sat in my comfy seat, reading my People magazine in my cardigan while the kids played air hockey. I tried to sit up very straight because I feel like responsible dental-cardigany people should have good posture. But I couldn’t relax because Amma was being really loud. Too loud. So I called her over and whispered to her sweet little face, “You.must.lower.your.voice.”

She pulled away dramatically and glared at me. Her face looked shocked. She pointed her chubby little finger right in my face and YELLED, “MOMMY! YOU SMELL LIKE A BAR! YOU SMELL LIKE A BAR, MOMMY!!! WHAT DID YOU DO, MOMMY?” Then she lay down on the floor and cried. She cried like—I don’t know—like a child who’d been betrayed. Like a child who maybe just learned that her mama fell off the wagon. Like a child from that intervention show. Exactly like that.

Okay. So the waiting room was very crowded, and all of sudden the noise just stopped. All the other cardigany moms looked up from their parenting magazines and right at me. They couldn’t look away, although I’m sure they really wish they could have.

That was when I remembered that I had a 1 billion ounce transparent water bottle with me, filled to the rim with BEET JUICE. This is the sort of thing one recovering from Lyme disease has to drink in the morning. But unfortunately, all I could consider was how incredibly much it looked like a forty-ounce bloody mary.

Briefly, I thought about standing up and making an announcement:

AHEM! Listen, you guys. This is just a misunderstanding. This is actually really funny. Funnier than you can even imagine! Ironic, even. Because, you see, I’m NOT drunk this morning, but I actually WAS, for like twenty years! But now I drink BEET JUICE. This is BEET JUICE. And this crying, kicking one—she’s talking about ENERGY BARS. I smell like ENERGY bars. Isn’t that hilarious? I’m not drunk. Swearsies.

No. One can’t make an announcement like this. I decided that pretty quickly. It hit me that the best thing I could do was just ACT SOBER.

Now the single best way to appear wasted when you are not wasted is to TRY HARD NOT TO ACT WASTED. Go ahead: try to act sober when you really ARE sober but also paranoid that people think you’re drunk. It’s impossible. You end up trying so hard to walk straight that you teeter. You try so hard to enunciate clearly that you sound like a robotic idiot. In short, the harder you try to look sober, the more you forget what sober looks like or even feels like, and the drunker you appear to be. THAT is what happened to me. I dropped my magazine. I tripped. I spilled my beet juice on my one and only cardigan. Cardigan! HA! Clearly a sham. Might as well have worn my Mötley Crüe shirt with yoga pants and called it a day.

We made it through the appointments. I stared in my rearview mirror the whole ride home CERTAIN that the dental office had called a police escort. I didn’t see any, but still, I demanded the kids stay silent the whole way home so I could CONCENTRATE ON DRIVING SOBER.

I swerved. I failed to obey the minimum speed and then the maximum. I forgot to use my blinker. We finally made it home, exhausted and frenzied. I immediately went to find the candy stash.