Small problems, no solutions

Among the more existential questions upon which my father sometimes ruminates is whether there are problems with no solutions. "I think there are," he said to me last week. "When I was younger, I believed that just about every problem had a solution. And not only that, but I thought I could solve most problems myself. Now I see that there are some problems that just don't have solutions."

I think he was referring to fairly large and significant problems, but I recalled his words yesterday afternoon as my 11-year-old daughter and I were making our way through what was turning out to be not a very good day for her. And it just wasn't anything I could solve. It wasn't really anything that could be solved. It wasn't anything momentous or critical. It was just....little things going wrong. And I couldn't do much but sit back and watch.

Yesterday was supposed to be the day Holly got her braces, and she was ready. She'd asked her friends for advice. She'd thought about what to eat for lunch, knowing she might not be able to eat again for a while, and she'd already talked me into stopping for a milk shake after her appointment since her friends had advised her that a milk shake was all she would want in the first few hours after the braces went on. She'd even gotten recommendations from her friends on what color wires to choose for her braces. Pink and blue, she confidently told me in the car as we drove to her appointment.

But the orthodontist examined her x-rays and said not quite yet. There was a baby tooth that needed to fall out first, which it soon would, he assured us.  And there was another one for which he was recommending an extraction. Until those two teeth were out of the way, the orthodontist said, it didn't make sense to proceed.

It's not like Holly had been looking forward to getting braces on, but by the time the day came, she was psyched up for it, and I could tell she felt deflated as we left. No solution, I told myself. She'll just have to wait out the disappointment. "You can still have the milk shake," I told her.

So we stopped at the ice cream stand. Holly drank a little bit of the shake in the car, and then once we got home decided to put it in the freezer so it would firm up a little bit more.

Except in doing so, she tipped it over and the whole thing spilled into the bottom of the freezer.

Holly is a very responsible 11-year-old. After letting out one small scream of frustration, she fetched a roll of paper towels and started mopping. There was milk shake all over everything. The inside of the freezer. The outside of the freezer. The bottom of the freezer. The floor around the freezer. All the other items already in the freezer.

It was a mess. I pitched in to help her, but it still took us nearly a half-hour. "And I hardly even drank any of my milk shake before it spilled!" Holly said mournfully as we mopped.

There was no solution to that either. We were too far from the ice cream stand to go out for another one, and I had to leave soon for an evening commitment. When we were finally done cleaning the freezer out, Holly asked if she could watch TV for a little while. Thinking it might be comforting, I said yes. And then the power went out.

Poor Holly. It just wasn't her day. Nothing all that bad was going on. Just little annoyances without solutions. Because some problems don't have solutions. And even if they are really trivial problems, as trivial as spilling a much-anticipated milk shake, it's frustrating.

When I got home from my evening meeting, the power was back on and Holly was cheerful. I assured her I would set up the appointment for the extraction as soon as possible and we would reschedule the braces.

Some problems are solved only by waiting them out. The freezer is cleaner now than it was pre-spill, and the power company fixed the lines as quickly as they could. I told Holly we would surely find another opportunity for a milk shake before the week is out.

It’s true that some problems just don't have solutions. But for those messes that can in fact be cleaned up, you pull out a roll of paper towels and get to work.

Bye bye braces

When I was in my twenties, I used to write in cafes and coffee shops and pubs and parks: sometimes stateside, sometimes by the sea, sometimes in the capitals of Europe. Today I’m writing in the waiting room of a suburban orthodontic practice.

But perhaps for the last time. It’s a long appointment today because Tim is getting his braces removed, two years almost to the day after they were put on.

In general, I’m one of the few parents who does not remark on how rapidly my children’s childhoods have passed by. While other parents are prone to saying “How did it happen so fast!” and “Where did the years go?”, I tend to feel like the past fifteen years or so have happened pretty much in real time. I don’t think this suggests that I’ve enjoyed my kids’ childhoods any less than other parents have enjoyed theirs. I think it’s just that as an essayist, blogger and journal-keeper, I spend so much time examining the minutiae of everyday life that it sort of expands for me in a way it doesn’t for everyone. Very little goes unremarked upon; this somehow keeps it from hurrying past. Socrates may have said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but he probably could not have known just how meticulously I would examine every aspect of my life and my children’s lives.

So I almost never say that babyhood or the toddler years or grade school has gone by quickly. But orthodontia seems to be an exception. I feel like it was just weeks ago that I was sitting here waiting for Tim to emerge from the examining room, new brackets and wires sparkling just like the tears welling in his eyes. This was a kid who couldn’t stand tags or buttons in his clothing; it hadn’t occurred to us that his sensory sensitivity would extend to his teeth, but he hated the bulkiness of the wires in his mouth for at least the first several days.

But that passed, and the braces became normal, and yet suddenly they’re gone again.

I’m not sure why this was the one milestone that seemed to come and go so quickly. Maybe because I thought it would all be a lot more work for me. Other than struggling to boost Tim’s spirits in those first few days, though, he didn’t need much from me. He figured out how to keep his teeth clean and what he could safely eat, and his appointments were straightforward twenty-minute events at eight-week intervals. It was a surprisingly simple process.

So as silly as it seems with eighth grade graduation, presumably a much more significant milestone, looming just five weeks away, this one feels big to me. For years before Tim got braces, we stressed about the affordability of it, but already it’s paid for and the braces are off. Tim walks out of the examining room beaming, and the change in his smile seems to accentuate all the other changes he’s gone through in twenty-four months’ time: now fourteen and a half, he’s about six inches taller, broader through the chest and shoulders, his voice deeper, his straight shiny hair gone curly.

It’s not quite enough to make me tearfully sentimental. That will probably come in five weeks’ time with graduation. But it’s one of many tangible changes he’ll undergo in the upcoming months and years. And I’m happy today to be here bearing witness.

This too shall pass, Tim

It was a bad time for Tim as this month began, at least bad within his personal frame of reference. He had a fever for four days and missed the overnight class trip. After four days of feeling crummy, he finally felt much better but had to stay home from school anyway per the doctor’s orders, so on that fifth day he was bored silly and frustrated by the awareness that all his friends were back from the trip and having fun at school without him. Last Monday, he was finally able to return to school, which was great – but then Tuesday, as had been planned weeks ago, it was off to the orthodontist to have braces put on.

I was so relieved to finally have Tim’s long-anticipated orthodontic treatment under way that I hadn’t given much thought to how it would actually feel to him. I don’t think he necessarily had, either – given the propensity of kids his age to live in the moment – and I suppose the fact that about fifty percent of his sixth grade class already has braces made both of us see it as an everyday thing.

In fact, I have to confess that I was looking forward to that first braces-installation appointment a little bit. These days, I look forward to anything that involves sitting in a waiting room with nothing much to do. Waiting at the airport for a flight to depart. Taking the car to Jiffy Lube. The kids’ haircuts. The Registry of Motor Vehicles. I’ve come to treasure those rare places where so little is expected of me other than sitting and waiting. Knowing Tim’s appointment would last a couple of hours, I knew I could catch up on a whole weekend of newspapers.

Besides that, Tim’s orthodontist’s office is a unique place to sit and wait. I think of it as the Disney World of medical practices. Every single employee I’ve ever met there is friendly, cheerful, and articulate. The waiting room has a coffee station for parents and Xbox video games for kids. Standard giveaways for patients include t-shirts, movie nights and water park excursions. I settled down happily with my laptop, logged on to the Internet via the office’s free wireless access, and waved Tim off as he headed to the dentist’s chair.

Two hours later, I realized my expectations had been a bit glib. I had one miserable boy on my hands. His teeth didn’t hurt, he told me as I repeatedly asked; he just felt so uncomfortable with wire laced throughout his mouth. The idea of eating anything didn’t appeal to him at all, and he spent an unhappy afternoon back at home.

Later that day he contemplated a bowl of oatmeal and his eyes welled up. “I’m going to eat oatmeal for the next two years?” he wailed.

In those few words, I saw the problem. He was assuming the way he felt at that moment, that hour, that whole day even, was how things would be for as long as he had braces. Even after twelve years of life, he hadn’t yet truly assimilated the transitory nature of time, the awareness that feeling bad, no matter what form it takes, doesn’t mean you won’t soon feel better.

“No, not for the next two years!” I told him. “You’ll be ready to eat regular food soon! You’ll get used to the braces. You’ll feel better.” After all, I pointed out, his friend Austin had been in braces for months, and did Tim ever hear him complain about how miserable a situation it was? Of course not, because the misery passes.

But, as most adults know, easy to say; sometimes harder to believe. When Tim was an infant, I never believed he’d someday sleep more than two hours at a time. When he was a toddler, I never believed he would someday talk. When Holly refused to give up crawling long after her first birthday, I feared she’d never walk. It wasn’t that I had unreasonable concerns about my kids’ development; it was just hard for me to remember that every stage passes, just as Tim was having trouble believing the initial discomfort of braces wouldn’t last for the full two years he was scheduled to wear them.

But it did pass, of course. A week later, he already feels normal in braces. He’s learning to brush his teeth carefully and avoid eating meat off the bone. He’s ready to reassure those friends who haven’t yet started their orthodontic treatment that it’s really no big deal. Oatmeal for the first day or two, he tells them, and then you’ll be fine.

So I hope it’s a lesson he’ll transfer to other situations: discomfort, pain and unhappiness pass. (So do tranquility, elation and triumph, of course, but no need to rush that lesson.) Braces was one way to discover that, and I’m sure it’s something he’ll continue learning, just as I continue learning it still. This is a start, though, and I can only hope he’ll long remember that two days after getting his braces on, he started feeling better.