Teething Problems

I’ve never liked going to the dentist. First of all, there’s the antiseptic smell that’s got a layer of ozone skirting under it. And don’t get me started on that whining sound which, to me, is exactly like the soundtrack of a Japanese horror movie, round about the time something the shape of a small child, all black with a lot of hair, emerges from the bathtub. 

But fundamentally, I don’t like going to the dentist for the simple reason that there’s something incredibly frightening about opening your mouth and letting someone wearing a mask approach it with sharp implements.

“You are such a baby!” Amanda said to me the other day as we sat in the waiting room of Dr Chan, our regular dentist.

“Seriously, thank you for coming with me,” I told her. My eyes were shut tight as I tried to breathe. “I really hate coming to the dentist!”

Amanda sighed. “Who doesn’t? But you’re not getting any drilling or scraping done, so what are you so scared about? It’s just a mouth-guard!”

A few weeks ago, during my regular six-monthly check-up, Dr Chan was prodding and scrapping inside my teeth with his scary hooked instrument while I was convinced I was about to pee in my pants from sheer panic. Eventually, he looked up and said, “Your back molars are quite worn down. You’re grinding your teeth in your sleep.”

“I most certainly am not,” I said automatically. Already, I didn’t like where this conversation was heading and I knew it was important that I stopped it in its tracks.

Dr Chan ignored me. “If you keep this up, your teeth will be all uneven which will cause you a whole world of problems. So, we’d better set you up with a mouth-guard. You can rinse now.”

As I bent towards the white porcelain bowl and slowly sloshed the icky peppermint flavoured solution in my mouth, I considered my options. Getting a mouth-guard meant I would have to come back and spend more time in this white torture chamber. But not getting one might mean I would eventually grind my teeth down to stumps, which would require an even longer period of time in here getting the problem fixed and God only knew what would be involved in repairing teeth stumps – although I imagined the process would involve a lot of needles and drilling.

By the time I’d spat out the solution and leaned back into the plastic-lined chair, I knew there was no way out of this. “I’ll give you an extra hour and that’s that,” I told Dr Chan firmly.

His eyes crinkled above his white face-mask, but for all I knew, he was sneering at me.

Which is why I now found myself back in the clinic, though this time, I had dragged Amanda along for moral support. 

“Honestly, you are such a baby!” she repeated as she pulled out her compact mirror and examined her make-up, moving her face up and down, and from side to side.

“You can talk, you have lovely teeth!” I said. “Mine are turning into stumps!”

“Well, if you get the mouth-guard, that’s not going to happen. The only thing about them, though, is that you’ll drool in your sleep!”

I sat up and stared at her. 

Amanda shrugged. “It’s true. Remember Roger? He had to wear one. Drooled all night. His pillow was soggy each morning. It was like sleeping with a bull-dog.”

“That’s really disgusting, Manda!” I said. 

She shrugged again. “Well, it’s that or have stumps for teeth. Not a good look. Anyway, part of the reason Roger and I broke up, I think, was because of the drooling. That and the fact he was so stingy! At one stage, I made him bring over his own set of pillows and pillow cases. I just couldn’t deal with the idea of him drooling all over my Frette linen!”

In the end, the fitting of the mouth-guard wasn’t as terrifying as I thought it would be. I basically had to bite into a metal mould filled with some kind of wet plaster that had the texture of chewing gum. “Not so bad, right?” Dr Chan said at one stage. “OK, bite one more time for me? There, all done!”

I massaged my jaw. I felt like I’d been chewing overcooked steak for an hour. “That’s it?”

“Yes! Come back next week for a fitting!”

Later that day, Amanda came home and presented me with a set of soft hand towels. “They’re Egyptian cotton and you put them on top of your pillow to protect the linen from your drool!”

Saffy says this is the beginning of the end. “First, drooling pads. What’s next? Plastic bed protectors? It’s over!”

Job Satisfaction

When we were growing up, my mother always threatened us with a succession of increasingly bizarre career choices if we didn’t study hard enough.

“Do you want to end up sweeping the streets? Is that what you want?” she asked my brother Jack when he came home with a red F for music theory. 

To which my sister, Michelle, who never met a button she didn’t want to push when it came to our mother, replied, “So what are you saying? All the street sweepers in Singapore are failed musicians?”

To which my mother, who never met a smart comment from her children she couldn’t shoot down with the precision of a heat-seeking nuclear missile, replied, “You got a C-plus for biology! You really think Harvard Medical School is going to accept you? Keep this up, and you’re going to end up an accountant!”

In the world according to my mother, being an accountant was way up there with being a dentist. To her, if you were an accountant, it just meant that you weren’t good enough to be a chartered accountant. Or, if you were a dentist, this must have meant you’d failed to become an actual doctor.

Which is why she’s always gone out of her way to stress to complete strangers that her daughter is a chartered accountant.

“Looking at her today, you really couldn’t tell that your mother was once such a hard ass!” Saffy said the other day. We were sitting on our sofa drinking tea and watching two guys abseil down outside our window, as they painted, one floor at a time, the exterior of our building. “She just seems so mellow.”

“Mellow, my ass,” I told her. “She still hasn’t told any of her friends that I’m no longer a lawyer!”

Saffy’s bosom stopped in mid-heave. “Wait. What?”

I pursed my lips. “Uh huh. Everyone still thinks I work at Ong & Ong! It’s ridiculous! And she tells everyone that Jack is on a retreat working on his symphony!”

Saffy frowned. “Isn’t he a dentist though?”

I shrugged. “An orthodontist, and a very good one, but Mother says she just can’t imagine why anyone would want to spend their lives looking into someone else’s mouths.”

“Better than being a gynaecologist!” Saffy said. “That’s surely got to be the worst job in the world. I’m a woman and even I get the icks thinking about it!”

“I think doing what these guys are doing is the worst job in the world,” I said, nodding to the painters swaying outside, strapped into their harnesses and, literally, hanging around. “Those harnesses look so painful!”

Amanda later said she’d spoken to one of them that morning, on her way back into the condo. “Apparently, after half an hour, they get quite numb in the crotch!” she reported, adding, “And not in a good way! The harnesses really cut off the blood circulation and it takes a while before they get any feeling back! Peeing isn’t fun, he told me.”

“Their poor girlfriends,” Saffy said, demonstrating, not for the first time, her ability to steer any conversation, even one about occupational health and safety, back towards sex. 

The subject of the world’s worst jobs occupied our attention for days. My sister said being a parent is probably top of her list. “Because children are so ungrateful! And I speak from personal experience!”

I sniffed. “Well, I was just talking to Jack and he says that the worst job in the world is the lab guy who examines stool samples!”

Michelle shrieked. “Oh my God! That’s so true! I mean really, talk about a sh** job!”

We fell about in hysterics. After a while, we picked ourselves up, still laughing. “Can you imagine?” Michelle said, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. “Can you imagine if we’d come home from school and told Mother that’s what we’d decided to do with our lives?”

Amanda says she doesn’t know what the big deal is. “It’s no different from picking up dog poo, and we did that three times a day with Pooch, remember?”

“Yeah, but we never bent our heads close to look at it,” Saffy pointed out. “And I know I always held my breath. You couldn’t do that in the lab. You’d pass out!”

“Well, I’m sure it’s not done out in an open-plan office!” Amanda said. “Surely, it’s all in some kind of protective box?”

Saffy was unconvinced. “Yeah, but you’d still have to look at the stuff!”

Sharyn says it’s really weird what single people talk about. 

Sleep It Off

A few Sunday mornings ago, I was sitting on sofa watching the latest episode of Dr Pimple Popper in which the good Dr Lee was grappling with a particularly difficult lipoma. 

“This woman is amazing,” I murmured to myself. 

Just then, Amanda walked in the front door, the sweat still shimmering off her dewy smooth skin. 

I was surprised. “Oh, you’ve been out this whole time? I thought you were still in bed!”

Amanda came to stand next to the sofa, and put her right leg in a quad stretch. “No, I’ve been up since 6.30. I decided to go for a run! Ooooh, that is one huge lipoma! The woman is amazing!”

“Tell it! I love her. I wish she was my mother!” I said and added, “Six-thirty? That’s way too early to be doing that kind of physical activity.”

“It’s a perfect time. The streets are empty. The air is clean and I don’t have to dodge those nasty bicycles and electric scooters on the pavements! There really should be a law against those things!” 

It turns out there are two kinds of people in the world: those who wake up early, and those who don’t.

When I was growing up, my parents would complain to all their friends that their children were born lazy on account of the fact that we would sleep till noon. “The whole day is over!” Mother would tell me when I stumbled downstairs, rubbing sleep from my eyes. “You’ve missed breakfast and it’s almost lunch time!”

To my sister, she’d announce, “You’re wasting your life sleeping! You’ll have plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead!”

“But we wake up so early during the week!” Michelle would reply. “The weekend is the only time I can catch up on my sleep!”

“Well, if you went to bed early  at 10pm, instead of 1 am, you wouldn’t need to catch up on any sleep!”

Michelle, barely 17 years old, rolled her eyes. “Who sleeps at 10pm?” 

As it turns out, people who aren’t 17, that’s who. These days, by the time 9.30pm swings around, my eyes start to droop. I used to read in bed till all hours. Now, I read a page, and I’m out.

“That’s how you know you’re getting old,” Amanda said, as she stretched her other leg. “You sleep early, and you wake early!”

“Which must mean Saffy is still 17, because she’ll sleep till noon, if you let her.”

Amanda sniffed. “That’s because she’s up till 3am watching tennis or golf! I don’t know how she does it. The minute I get into bed, rub some moisturizer into my hands and I’m ready to call it a night!”

Saffy emerged from her bedroom shortly after noon. With her bloodshot eyes, wild hair and rumpled nightgown, she looked ready to star in the sequel to ‘The Ring’. She collapsed into a chair at the dining table. “Oh. My. God.” 

Amanda looked at her sideways. “You know you’ve missed lunch, right?”

Saffy turned a red eye towards her. “How does Jennifer Aniston do it?!” 

It turns out that Saffy had read an article about how famous people like Jennifer Aniston, Michelle Obama and Tim Cook only sleep four hours a night. The article didn’t come right out and say it, but the hidden message was that if you sleep four hours a day, you too could become intelligent, gorgeous, famous and fabulously wealthy.

Which is why Saffy got into bed at 11pm after catching up on ‘Big Little Lies’, set her alarm for 4am, and found herself utterly unable to sleep till 1am. When the alarm went off three hours later, she stumbled out of bed and then through the fog of her sleep deprivation, it occurred to her that she’d never really worked out, once she was awake at 4am, precisely what she was going to do.

“I mean, Tim Cook has an empire to run. Michelle Obama writes books and gives lectures. Jennifer Aniston does yoga and meditation and makes movies. I have a day job in HR!”

“You could check your emails?” Amanda suggested as she passed Saffy a cup of super strong coffee. 

Saffy moaned. “Wake up at 4am to check my emails about personnel redundancies? What kind of a life is that? So anyway, I tried to do some yoga, but I lost interest after two minutes. I couldn’t concentrate on my book. I couldn’t focus on the TV. In the end, I went back to bed at 6am!”

When Saffy recounted the story at work the next day, Sharyn said, “Wake up at 4am? You think so easy become rich and famous, issit? If liddat, I orredi billionaire!”

A Leg Up

My parents never told any of their children anything about the birds and the bees. They simply figured they were paying enough for our expensive education, so it only made sense that someone would teach it to us eventually; otherwise, what were they paying all that money for?

It’s the same approach they applied to litter. Which is why when my sister Michelle’s primary school organized a ‘pick up litter at the beach day’ and tried to get the parents to also join in, they made a critical mistake in actually telephoning my mother.

When she put down the phone, she immediately turned to Father. “I’ve just had the most astonishing conversation!”

He stared at her over the top of his newspaper. “I don’t see how. You just said, ‘Hello’ and ‘No’ and hung up the phone. How is that a conversation?”

Mother sniffed. “That was Michelle’s school! They wanted me to pick up garbage at the beach! Why is that my job? I pay taxes so someone else can do that kind of thing!”

My father’s mother did not raise a stupid son, which is why he wisely refrained from pointing out that Mother, despite receiving a very substantial household allowance from him, did not pay taxes on account of the fact that she didn’t actually work at a job that required taxes to be paid. 

Mother was so affronted by the phone call that the next day, she pulled Michelle out of school and re-enrolled her somewhere else.

Years later, over afternoon tea of kaya toast at Toast Box, we were still talking about our parents’ division of labour. 

“I just don’t understand how your parents just palmed off the responsibility for sex education to the school,” Saffy said, shaking her head as she gently blew on her kopi-o.

“I know, right?” Amanda said.

“Oh my God,” Michelle said, “I’m so glad they didn’t! I can’t imagine a more awkward conversation!”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “You know, I love your parents, but they’re really weird.”

“Tell them what conversation they had with you instead!” I told Michelle, who immediately rolled her eyes.

“So shortly after that beach litter phone call,” she began, “and I had just started at my new school, Mother picked me up one day. Which was weird, because she never picked any of us up. She never saw the point because otherwise why have a driver in the first place?”

“Which makes complete sense,” I said. 

Michelle nodded. “Yes. Which meant that her coming to pick me up from school was a big deal and it also meant she wanted to speak to me about something very private.”

“Which was?” Amanda prodded. 

“Which was to tell me that if and when I ever got married, I was not getting a dowry!”

Michelle sat back in her chair triumphantly. Amanda gasped.

Saffy blinked. “Wait…What?”

“Isn’t that just crazy?” Michelle asked. “She couldn’t talk to us about sex, but the subject of dowries was completely on the table!”

“What I never understand is why she didn’t get the lawyer to speak to you about it,” I said. “After all, that was his job!”

Saffy waved her hands. “Wait! A dowry? Is that still a thing?”

“Of course it is!” Amanda said. “Stanley Ho’s daughter just got $100m dowry when she got married!”

Michelle’s eyes widened. “She did? Cash or stock?” she asked, demonstrating, not for the first time, that here was a woman whose expensive education hadn’t gone to waste. 

Saffy was astonished. “What century are we living in?!”

The next day at the office, it was all she could talk about, though Sharyn, surprisingly, didn’t see what the issue was.

“Ay, if my parent give me dowry when I get married, today, I no need work, ah, I tell you!” Her already magnified eyes became even more enlarged behind her thick spectacles. “So shiok, stay at home all day and watch TV and shake leg!”

“Your parents aren’t that wealthy, Shazz!” Saffy pointed out.

“Who say? My fadder own the Toyota dealership in Muah, you know! Every year we go to Cameron Highland holiday! But then before I get married, he kena cheated by his business partner and lose all his mah-ney!”

Saffy blinked. “Oh, I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

“Aiyah, is old story. So now, like that, lor! Must every day come to work. Boh pian,” she sighed as she stared at the stack of HR reports on her desk. “Not like Stanley Ho daughter. That one confirm go on honeymoon, come back and shake leg, one!”

Saffy says she’s never understood the allure of shaking her legs as a way of passing time, but for $100m, she could probably learn to like it.