MARRIED TO A DENTIST

A Story of Love and Teeth

When asked what it's like to be married to a dentist, my first response is glib: I get razzed for being the only parent who sends their kid to a sleepover without a toothbrush; I have a school debt load as big as a house mortgage; and, I'm expected to have perfect teeth and even better breath, which, in my experience, is not necessarily always simultaneously possible.

But then there's the response that's not glib, but heartfelt -- as true as anything I've ever believed -- and the only way it can be expressed is to put it like this: I can't separate out my particular dentist guy from his dentist job. Together, they make him the dentist I'm married to.

Let me explain.

My particular dentist guy was once an unfulfilled manufacturing and plastics engineer who drew computerized pictures of a 737 airplane's wing rivets for The Boeing Company, and, later, designed waterski and wakeboard bindings for the likes of world class skier Andy Mapple for O'Brien Watersports. Cool enough stuff, to be sure, but that same engineer guy would come home disappointed that he'd sat at a machine all day and/or had only spoken to one or two other human beings -- about nothing that meant anything to him -- throughout the course of a day.

Then my particular engineer guy got laid off and couldn't find more engineering work and fixed houses as a contractor for six months -- and somewhere in there he observed his younger brother at work as a new dentist. There, he saw immediately how he, too, could use his hands, his head, and his heart all in one fell swoop: by being a dentist guy.

After watching his brother treat the whole person -- seeing how the mouth was the gateway to health for the rest of the body (doctor), watching his brother's hands move in intricate and detailed ways in a small space (engineer), and listening to the care, banter, and concern shared between patient and dentist (human being) -- he decided to make a career change.

He returned to college at 33, taking three years of pre-requisite classes from the school where he'd graduated seven years earlier. During his final quarter of pre-requisites, he filled out dental school applications, wrote a killer statement of intent (thank me very much), and earned himself a seat in the University of Pacific's three-year program, the only one of its kind in the nation.

After a mighty garage sale where we sold everything we could think to sell (mostly the quiver of free wakeboards he'd aquired) we packed up our 3-year-old and 4-year-old kids and moved ourselves to San Francisco for a life of school, loans, and part-time work.

We've never looked back.

School was challenging and scary -- after all, we'd put everything on the line to pursue this -- and sometimes the requirements felt elusive. But, in the end, it was fulfilling and thrilling.

My dentist guy, who's just bizarre enough to think it's funny that the time to go to the dentist is "Tooth Hurty," and who thinks Eugene Levy's nerdy dentist character in that Christopher Guest mockumentary, Waiting for Guffman, is highly quotable -- "People ask me if I was the class clown [smug nod]; I tell them, 'No, but I sat next to him, and I studied him' [smug nod followed by pathetic Johnny Carson impersonation]" -- comes home from work happy every day, deeply moved by the lives he's encountered.

Staying true to HIPAA's confidentiality code, he tells me no names or places, but his eyes water nearly each and every night as he tells me about hardship, victory, silliness, or gratitude he's seen or experienced in the mouths or lives of his patients. He never got that as an engineer. Granted, some engineers don't need it, and, admittedly, some engineers manage to get it somehow, but my guy needed something extra and dentistry is how he gets it.

So when he leans against the kitchen counter at age 41 and talks to me about his work with tears in his eyes, I'm very clear about this particular guy who loves his particular job, and I hone in on that soft smile. I hone in on his lovely, if slightly imperfect teeth and his occasionally bad breath, because, well, sometimes you just can't have it all -- but I know you can come close.