Mother’s Teeth

by Timothy Ngome

I never thought I would be fascinated by teeth until my mother began losing hers. It started with a molar, which she produced one morning like a prize rabbit from a hat. She was grinning, as if the tiny white tooth was some heroic discovery, and I was supposed to be equally impressed.

I wasn’t.

“I’m saving them,” she said. “For science.”

Later that day, she placed the tooth in a tiny jar on the kitchen counter. Inside it was a piece of cotton, like a soft bed for a tiny, predatory creature. 

I asked her what kind of science required loose teeth. She smiled and said, “The kind that makes life easier for people like you, who are terrible at remembering birthdays.”

The next morning, I woke to the sound of her rummaging through the drawers in the bathroom. She emerged holding something that looked like a tiny, gleaming shard of marble. “Another one,” she announced proudly. “I think it’s an incisor this time.” 

She waved it at me as though it were a medal of valor. I considered telling her I wasn’t impressed, but decided against it. My premium irony was best deployed silently, a raised eyebrow and a sigh more effective than words. 

Over the weeks, I began to notice patterns. Each lost tooth came with a ritual: she would inspect it under a lamp, weigh it on the kitchen scale (I assume to prove it had mass), and then carefully place it in a jar lined with cotton. She labeled each jar meticulously: Upper Right First Molar, Lower Left Canine, Incisor, Adult Version Two. The collection was growing into something impressive; a  miniature, eerie city of teeth.

Her fascination with  teeth extended into meals. Apples became a hazard. Toast had to be buttered to the precise thickness she could chew without risk of cracking her front teeth. When she ate carrots, she sliced them lengthwise, thin as chopsticks. Watching her navigate food was like observing a master thief avoiding security lasers, each bite a test of agility and patience.

Of course, this created problems for the rest of us. As her child and nearest thing to an assistant curator, I became responsible for her dental “archive.” I had to remember which tooth went in which jar, dust off the labels, and sometimes gently convince her that a tiny molar didn’t belong in the jar labeled Canine. 

It was a job that required diplomacy, patience, and a strange willingness to witness the absurdity of life without judgment. By the time she lost a front tooth, I had begun to accept that I would never eat a caramel without considering the consequences. My mother’s smile had transformed. She looked like a Picasso painting: jagged, whimsical, a little terrifying. 

She reveled in her new appearance, practicing grins in the mirror, experimenting with the angles of her mouth to find the most dramatic expression. 

She even began to craft stories about her teeth. “This one,” she said one afternoon, pointing at a small jar with a delicate molar, “was stolen from a pirate ship.” I asked her which pirate. She simply shrugged and said, “All pirates are the same,sneaky and salty. And also charming, which is why I allowed the theft.”

It was around this time that I realized the teeth were more than just objects. They were trophies, evidence of survival, proof of my mother’s stubborn defiance against time. And like any proper premium anecdote, they were also a perfect excuse for mockery. I would sometimes peek at her jars and imagine them speaking in tiny voices: “Release us, or face the consequences!” Or perhaps: “We’ve been through enough.”

Her obsession extended beyond teeth to the tools that extracted them. She had a drawer in the bathroom dedicated to toothbrushes, floss, and small metal implements I assumed dentists would recognize. I once asked her if she planned to use them on herself. She smiled slyly and said, “Of course not. I hire professionals for that. These are for research purposes only.”

Family dinners became complicated. At Thanksgiving, she would carefully distribute soft foods while holding court with her jars. Cousins whispered behind my back, marveling at the eccentricity. “Does she really keep all those teeth?” one asked. Yes. Yes, she did. And each one had a story, a ritual, a place in her growing empire of dental relics.

One Saturday, I walked into the kitchen to find her brushing a tooth she had just lost. Not her own, but one of the previously extracted teeth. “It’s important to keep them clean,” she said seriously, as though I should have known this. “You never know who might want to examine them.” 

I didn’t ask who. I didn’t want to know. Some questions, I realized, were better left unanswered in a house with this much white porcelain strewn about.

The jars multiplied. There was one on the mantle, two on the windowsill, and a particularly ambitious line across the bookshelf. Each jar held a single tooth, cushioned in cotton, labeled and catalogued with precision that bordered on religious fervor. 

I began to imagine a museum one day curating her collection: “Here you see the Upper Left First Premolar, circa 2025. Note the slight chip at the edge, a telltale sign of early carrot consumption.”

Visitors were rare, but when they came, she would give impromptu tours. She was proud, even theatrical, describing the heroic journey of each tooth. I sometimes watched from the doorway, struggling to keep a straight face as she described the “battle wounds” sustained while chewing tough bread or hard candy. And I thought, in that weird, existential poetic way: life is strange, and the human obsession with things, even small things like teeth, is even stranger.

It was during these tours that I realized something else: I had become complicit. I was the record-keeper, the assistant curator, the silent audience to my mother’s teeth. My job was to nod, smile, and sometimes raise an eyebrow when she told particularly wild stories about pirate thefts or heroic escapes from rogue forks.

And then came the night of the wisdom tooth. This was a big event. She announced it like a royal decree: “Tonight, the final frontier.” She had prepared the bedroom like a surgical theater: towels neatly stacked, flashlight at the ready, and a small cup of water for rinsing. 

I sat on the edge of the bed, holding her hand, unsure whether I was participating in a medical procedure or a performance art piece.

She made a show of wiggling the tooth. “Feel that?” she asked. I did. It was loose, the last of her original set, a tiny relic of her youth. “It’s coming,” she said. “And when it does, you must be ready.” I nodded, realizing that readiness here meant having cotton, a jar, and a sense of solemn ceremony.

The extraction was anticlimactic. The tooth popped out with minimal resistance, like a cork from a particularly compliant bottle of wine. She placed it in a jar, stared at it, and then kissed it. “Farewell, my friend,” she said. And I thought about the absurdity of kissing a tooth, about the strange intimacy of watching someone treasure something so small and so inherently useless.

In the weeks that followed, the jars grew, but so did my understanding. These teeth were not just objects. They were markers of survival, witnesses to time, evidence that my mother had lived and laughed and eaten and occasionally chewed things that should have been avoided. They were reminders that life, in all its absurdity, required care, attention, and occasionally, a jar of cotton.

I began to notice patterns in her storytelling as well. She had a tendency to assign personalities to the teeth. Molars were brave but stubborn; incisors were witty and slightly impatient; canines were loyal, protective, a little savage. 

Sometimes she held them up as if to demonstrate these traits, placing them in mock battles on the counter. I often laughed, quietly, imagining what a dentist might think if they walked in mid-war between a molar and an incisor.

Her obsession also taught me a kind of respect. She was meticulous, organized, reverent even, about something that most people would consider trivial or grotesque. And in that reverence, I learned a strange lesson about life: we all need something to care for, even if it is absurd, even if it is tiny, even if it is a tooth slowly collecting dust in a jar.

I sometimes think back to the early days, when I had no interest in teeth, when I saw them only as tools for chewing and speaking. I laugh at my naïveté now. My mother transformed them into something remarkable. They became a lens through which I could observe her resilience, her humor, and her uncanny ability to make life both terrifying and hilarious at the same time.

By the time her collection was complete, it was impressive: dozens of teeth, each with its own story, its own personality, its own tiny universe of cotton and glass. And I realized something else: I had grown attached too. I checked the jars before bed. I polished the glass occasionally. I even found myself worrying what would happen if a jar fell and shattered, scattering teeth across the carpet.

And in those quiet moments, as I stared at the jars lined up like a miniature city of white, I understood something important: we mark the passage of time in strange ways. Some people use calendars, some use photos, some use trophies. My mother used her teeth. And through her, I learned that even in the smallest, strangest, most absurd rituals, there is meaning, there is humor, and there is love.

So, when someone asks me about my childhood, I do not speak of playgrounds or school events. I speak of jars of teeth, of the careful rituals, of the stories that turned molars into heroes and canines into warriors. 

I speak of a mother who, in losing her teeth, reminded me how to truly see the world: absurd, fragile, and utterly fascinating.

And perhaps, in the end, that is the greatest science of all.