Sounding off: Should we mind the gap?

The four-year-old held his broken front tooth - sans root - in his hand, and looked up at his mother. Tears ran down his plump cheeks and caught themselves in a sob. He wailed. And then some more.

"How did this happen?" the mother shouted.

The boy offered a vehement explanation. "I didn't break it. That boy pushed me. He broke my tooth," he said.

Inference and (parental) common sense filled the gap between the ivory evidence and the incident. "What did you do before he pushed you?" she asked, stanching the almost empty dental socket and the tumescent upper lip with cotton wool.

The sobs stopped. The boy looked down at his chipped tooth, and said, "We were playing racing-race. I was going to come first, but he pushed me."

"OK. You will be fine," said the mother, her voice mellow and mollycoddling. "Maybe you shouldn't play with him again."

Did the four year old? Of course he did. Playtime ruck continued with many more "racing-races". The scrimmage was forgotten. What remained was the gap, a vestige of memory, which reminded him of his missing tooth.

"Mama, what will everybody say when they see me?" or, "When will my tooth come back?" the boy kept asking. Some days his questions had an undertone of resignation, on others, sadness.

A visit to the dentist confirmed the mother's fears. The root of the milk tooth would take another two to three years to fall out. Prognosis? Wait. As I listened to the mother narrate, I tried to highlight the misplaced aesthetics braced on a full set of teeth.

I remarked, "He's only four."

She replied, "He is so conscious... I'm upset too. It ruins his smile. And the school had scheduled a group class photograph the day after the incident!"

"He's only four!" I remonstrated. "C'mon, it's OK. Boys will be boys. It's the rough and tumble of surviving childhood. Those his age have all sorts of evidence as they punch, wrestle, fisticuff… "

She interrupted. "You don't understand. As a mother, it's horrible seeing him this upset over a missing tooth - his front tooth! I feel bad just thinking about his photos and videos [over the next three years]."

I hesitated. What could I say to assuage a mother's distress? What could she say to palliate her son's insecurity or remedy his puerile aesthetic faculties?

In the adult world, broken bones or teeth turn into stories of triumph or parodies of caution. If we are lucky, we are able fix the broken bits and align these to our visually obsessed, image-conscious culture. But when the same kind of story belonged to a four-year-old boy and his inability to make sense of a missing tooth, I couldn't offer a primer.

I searched for the words to mend the fragile situation. I found none. In parting, I simply said to her, "Don't worry, it's temporary."