We’ve been reading a book called There’s A House Inside My Mummy each night before bedtime, a winsome tumble through the fact that people sometimes exist inside other people you know.
I don’t mind this book’s approach because it is adorable, and a useful way of explaining the inexplicable miracle of human reproduction through metaphor. It’s useful for me to learn as I have a habit of being altogether too literal. ‘You can’t fit a baby in there,’ he says, patting his mum’s belly, ‘it’s too small, you would be sore!’ ‘It is, a bit,’ we tell him, which is something the book doesn’t really go into, but we feel it’s worth being honest about, particularly in light of all the new noises his mum is making as she makes her way around the house.
A lot of parenting involves explaining things in ways so simple that their strangeness is made new to yourself. I know this because, every night, I have to explain the importance of dental hygiene to a three-year-old, too. Teeth, I try to get across, are just external bones which erupt from the flesh of your mouth, one by one, like parasitic wasps. You didn’t ask for them, but now they’re here, and you must scrub and polish these bones every day or they will rot, fall out of your head and you might starve to death.
This usually gets him scrubbing quite avidly, and more than once has caused him to state that he most definitely does not want his teeth to fall out. Welllllll, I say – at the risk of changing the terms and conditions quite unreasonably – in about 18 months, they’ll start randomly tumbling from your gums so they can be replaced with your adult teeth. This is good, though. This means you’re a big boy, for these teeth will be massive, my darling, the same size as Mummy and Daddy’s, even though your head being not even half the size as ours by the time the cycle has come through.
Despite this lack of cranial real estate, you’ll get an extra 12 teeth on top of the 20 that will be replaced, because your body just has them knocking around. And I do mean knocking around, dear boy, since these 32 comically oversized adult’s teeth are already in your head, in all stages of development, lurking in every recess of your skull to emerge from a mouth you might presume to be prohibitively small to afford this process. If I were to x-ray your face, sweet child, we would see a clear snapshot of the full grisly complement of gnashers, crowding out every inch of your head like some sort of abominable HR Giger lithograph.
Just like Mummy has a baby inside her tummy, you have an adult inside you, and it will begin bursting into life via a gory profusion of discarded enamel, just over a year from now.
‘Daddy,’ he says, as I tuck him in, feeling much the wiser about babies, teeth and the joys of life, ‘can you leave the light on, please?’
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
