The Wisdom Tooth: A Black Dad short story

إِنَّ مِنْ أَزْوَجِكُمْ وَأَوْلـدِكُمْ عَدُوّاً لَّكُمْ
Verily, among your wives and your children are enemies for you - Quran 64:14

Lemme, tell you a story.

First a prologue:  

My mom and I had a horrible relationship as I grew up. One day, I made the resentful comment that she "wasn't even my real mother".  I really had no idea how asinine that comment was until my father sat me down and deconstructed my pseudo-intellectual assessment of my mother. I will save the details for my book - but I learned that children are hardly able to give a just estimate of their parents - even into adulthood. It is always up to parents to bear that cross - and bear the witness where kids can't see.

*****

Once upon a time: A man went to jail facing charges for crimes that he did not commit, He sadly realized he was fighting a case that everyone but a handful of people thought he was actually guilty of.  That realization made him even more determined to fight and beat it.

While this Man was locked up, his wisdom tooth split down the middle and the nerve got infected. The pain was so bad the Man wanted to run his head into a cell door just to stop it. The worse thing for him was he was Muslim and tt was Ramadan so fasting became difficult. And the pain was always at its worst at night, when he was locked in his cell starting at 10pm.

It was a tooth that he was told a long time ago – 15 years prior - that it would need be surgically removed because it was impacted into his skull, so the Man began saving money in a stipend account  set up thru his job via their medical benefits plan.

Meanwhile, the Man was not able to see a dentist until the end of Ramadan, so he suffered mightily for over 30 days. And instead of  a surgical procedure to remove the tooth that was impacted into his skull – the dentist performed the extraction like any other, except for literally having to brace his foot on the chair as he twisted and twisted and pulled and pulled. The grinding noise is something the Man still hears to this day.

In truth, he should have had that tooth removed correctly years ago, but as he was just accumulating the money, his step-daughter suddenly needed a root canal. With no dental insurance provided by her own father, the Man took her to my dentist and paid for her tooth - over $1300 - using all the money he had saved for his own tooth, and then some.

He remembers thinking at the time, "This is the stuff that men do to take care of their kids." There was no hesitation. No sense of reluctant sacrifice. No need for gratitude or accolades. His kid was in need and it was his duty to meet it. 

He never got that surgery, and now, years later, there he was sitting in jail with a face swollen from a  deep and painful abscess, fighting a bogus case where out of nowhere, his step-daughter decided to write a Facebook post cheer-leading the person who framed him, branding him as a guilty abuser. (A post his lying framer pointed to the DA who then used it as evidence to deny him a fair and reasonable bond.)

And the moral of this story"

Don't have the temerity to suggest to a Man that raised and sacrificed for you his own body parts,  that because you are wallowing in hurt feelings, he can't call you his step-kid.

The End - Periodt.