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These days kids who undergo oral surgery to remove impacted wisdom teeth come home with a do-rag-like thing wrapped around their noggins.

Except instead of tying cloth from the forehead to the base of the skull to protect an elaborate processed hairdo — hence, “do” rag — this stretchy white band wraps from a patient’s chin to crown.

Some clever person designed it with pockets to hold cold gel packs against sore jaws to reduce post-op swelling and provide some numbing benefit. Also, a Velcro fastener at the top allows patients to tighten or loosen it for a handy custom fit.

For about 12 hours our eldest son, Carl, 16, wore it for added relief after his oral surgeon at Aspen Oral and Facial Surgery in Erie removed three impacted wisdom teeth earlier this month.

At 17, I underwent the same procedure with the same number of teeth — just without the cold pack comfort and fashion statement of the do-rag.

We both needed the oral surgery because impacted wisdom teeth — third molars that have not erupted through the gum – often grow in crooked ways that can crowd other teeth out of their functional position.

As the oral surgeon cut through the gum to pull two of the wisdom teeth and break the third in half to extract it safely given the nearby nerve to Carl’s chin, I sat in the waiting room listening to love songs about broken hearts geared toward today’s teenagers and young adults.

I also watched a sparrow outside the tinted window as it dabbled in the bird bath while the outside temperature rose to almost 100 degrees.

In that relaxed repose I began asking a good question — as in, what else needs to go to grow?

With the school year starting this week for our three sons and 33,000 other students across the St. Vrain Valley School District, some kids and their parents or guardians might be asking the same question.

What out-of-sight bad habits or attitudes disturb or threaten to disturb what obviously otherwise works so well?

I’m no oral surgeon, but I know that a backyard vegetable patch does better in its season with good weeding — yanking plants by the roots that suck up water and cast shade over desirable plants that need more sunlight to thrive.

As we continue recovering from fallout related to the COVID crisis, I am viewing the new school year as a reminder to students and all the lifelong learners that surround them to identify what limits learning and to pull out those things.

That is the trick, after all — to remove whatever exists beneath the surface that could jeopardize anything up top where you consciously live. To do so can preserve a functional bite as in Carl’s case or promote a lifestyle primed to test potential as fresh opportunities arise.

A former college roommate and longtime friend of mine never holds a scalpel. She never sends her patients home with a do-rag fitted with cold gel packs and a narcotics prescription if the pain creeps up to a throbbing level.

Still, she is in the business of identifying and removing wisdom teeth-like issues that put or could put pressure on a person’s otherwise healthy life.

Because of her sensibility as a licensed professional counselor in Wisconsin, she writes me notes without disclosing anything confidential that reveal how that process humbles her.

From that place, I’ll bet she does right by her troubled clients.

She is in it with them because anyone who values professionally removing what harms and nurturing what helps likely values the same for themselves.

Her most recent card to me featured a quote from the Velveteen Rabbit, the star rabbit who knows it is a stuffed animal and wants to become real through a child’s love in the 1922 namesake book written by British author, Margery Williams:

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Perhaps Carl felt “very shabby” as he woke up from surgery — groggy and dry mouthed given the gauze packed on the sockets to soak up blood.

Sometimes, what needs to go to grow leaves a mess behind. But now, more than 10 days out, his puffy cheeks have vanished and the gums continue healing.

Witnessing this process in this physical sense encourages me to remember the process in every other sense — that what begins with extraction can end with provision for something better, like space itself.

Pam Mellskog can be reached at p.mellskog@gmail.com or 303-746-0942. For more stories and photos, please visit https://www.timescall.com/tag/mommy-musings/.

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