My Mother’s Teeth
were prone to cavities from childhood.
In my mind’s eye, I see her gaps-for-teeth, hand cupping mouth, handkerchief clasped to lips after an extraction — that euphemism that stinks of silent Soviet disappearances, people pulled from dark rooms at night, never returning.
Once healed, the gaps were filled variously with dental implants and partial dentures: my mother’s mouth is not quite her own.
The extracted people were never returned, which my mother made it her duty to remember. If she is passionate about anything, it is decrying Stalinism and its travesties. For years, her stories transfixed me, but by my teens they stoked a growing rage. There was not much more to her mothering than the passing down of Soviet horrors. I was starving for something which she couldn’t give.
My mother drilled her coming-of-age, late-1970s, music-conservatory-student revelations about the Soviet dystopia — learned at the knee of a rather radical anti-communist professor — into my brain, into the new millennium, into a new hemisphere.
My mother’s mouth is filled with ghosts.
My own cavities began before elementary school. Baba took me to the dentist, an old friend of hers, Eleanora Aleksanna, whose son had long before been Baba’s elementary school student. We entered a large open hall full of dental chairs and short-haired women in white lab coats and face masks leaning over screaming children.
I was praised for being so good and so brave and for my beautiful braid only to bite Eleanora Aleksanna’s finger to bleeding moments later.
We returned to her several times, without incident, before our own great extraction from Russia found us in the United States.
American dentists peered into my mouth, as into my mother’s, in awe, studying its contents as though it were an archeological site revealing pre-modern dental composites.
I was taking after my mother.
***
In 2019, a year after my mother and I became estranged, I had to have an incisor pulled. It had gotten infected and pain had grown beyond the treatment of all available drugs.
The procedure took hours. The dentist coaxed out my tooth little by little from my numbed gum. My partner held my hand, then drove me home to mashed potatoes and tea.
I smiled big for my phone, beaming almost to a scowl into the camera. It was tooth number 4 that they took — I had been so worried about how the gap would look — but it was barely visible on my American smile. I sent pictures to everyone but my mother.
The gap left by my mother is surreal. It throbs and whirls to Tchaikovsky, it weeps to Chopin; it weeps so much more than it dances. I shut my mouth on the commotion.
The gap left by my mother is older than our estrangement.
It is a socket dressed in layers of scarlet and mauve scar tissue, pulsing and aching from time to time but calming, calming as the years tick by.
I exorcise the ghosts from my mouth, my mother’s legacy, through the power of my breath, the vibration of my voice, the speaking of myself into being. I was never supposed to do these things: she raised me to carry on her burdens, to be an organ of her body, a part of her, not out of malice but limitation. A limitation I am still trying to parse.
Sometimes I Google potential diagnoses to explain my mother’s absence — the way she seemed never really there even when she stood in front of me, the way she needed me to lead, even as a child, to parent her. When I find myself doing this futile exercise, I have learned it means I’m hurting, struggling, and it’s time to take care of me.
In broad strokes, I know the problem: a combination of Soviet political oppression, anti-Semitism, patriarchy, family dysfunction, and a prolonged separation from Baba in Mama’s toddlerhood. When you put it all together, it’s called complex trauma. I know a lot about it because it was passed to me. Unconsciously, unintentionally, brutally, ceaselessly.
My teeth, my mother’s teeth: tombstones to the bones of Soviet ghosts who couldn’t find a way to scream but through our mouths.
