The only place I can be a mouth-breather and a mom.

Why, maybe I *will* floss...

I had a dentist appointment earlier this week. It was a routine cleaning, so the night before, I flossed extra hard, trying to make up for six months of neglect. Sizing up my bloody gums in the mirror, I realized it was too little, too late. Sigh.

This isn’t new turf for me. I get The Lecture every six months like clockwork; I’m convinced dental hygenists take a course titled, “Guilt: The Most Powerful Dental Tool.”

I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid The Lecture,  and thought I had recently stumbled upon the best technique ever, until it resulted in my being called a “mouth-breather.”

This time, realizing that — yet again! — my gums would turn on me faster than a mafia rat, I decided to have my story ready. My eyes traveled around my bathroom. What could I blame for excessive bleeding?

Then my eyes spotted it: baby aspirin. JACKPOT!

So the next day, there I am in the chair, tilted back, getting scraped and prodded. “Wow, your gums are really bleeding,” the hygenist commented. First off, SHOCKER — didn’t you read my chart?

Then she said, “Are you not flossing?”

Rather than answer her question, I simply said, “Could it be the baby aspirin?”

She nodded. “You take baby aspirin? It is a blood thinner. That’s probably the culprit.”

Then, apropos of nothing, I said, “I was hit by a car in February,” as if that explained why I might be taking baby aspirin. (Don’t even TRY to connect the dots. They’re so far apart I could park a car between them. I guess I was trying to show her that in the big scheme of things, being concerned about flossing is slightly ridiculous, considering there are cars out there ready to run us down.)

She looked concerned. “On the sidewalk?”

WHAT? Most people don’t even assume I was a pedestrian when it happened. Yet this woman went so far as to imagine a car hopping the curb and taking me out. Wow. No wonder she so willingly accepts my excuses for flossing — she clearly had an active imagination.

In any case, it worked. I dodged The Lecture, and when the dentist came to check my teeth, she made an excuse for me. “There’s some bleeding because she takes baby aspirin.”

I don’t even know why I care, considering my dentist always mistakes me for one of his other patients, apparently a suburban mom. A few visits ago, he whipped into my room and said, “Good to see you. How are the girls?”

Without missing a beat, I looked down at my chest and said, “Doing fine!”

I’m pretty sure he didn’t get it.

This time, making idle chitchat, he asked how my summer was going. “Too fast!” I told him.

His response? “Yeah, I can imagine — what with all the soccer games and dropping the kids off at the pool.”

Since his hands were in my mouth, I just blinked. Sir, I won’t even touch that.

And they wonder why people avoid going to the dentist?

Tags: dentist, flossing, humor, lies I've told