Colgate Vs. Crest

I grew up a Colgate girl. And while we may have ventured off into experimental usage of Arm & Hammer or Aquafresh, eventually, we always came back to Colgate.

My husband’s family are Crest people. He will use the Colgate toothpaste that I keep stocked in the bathroom cabinet, but left to purchase on his own, my husband will buy Crest.

I don’t think he even knows he does it. I can predict with near certainty that he doesn’t really think about how different our families are in other ways.

The first time I ever visited his family, I sat at the dinner table, utterly bemused at the amount of milk they drank, and how little talking there was, compared to my family. (They were too busy eating.) With four people living in their house, my in-laws consume about eight gallons of milk per week. My own parents rarely have more than a half gallon in the refrigerator at any given time.

Another evening at my in-laws,’ I was teasing my brother-in-law about not eating any vegetables, pointing out that he was holding an ear of corn. In almost perfect unison, at least three other people at the table looked up from their plates and said, “Corn’s a grain.”

Well. Maybe I can let that one go. After all, I have family members who would argue that macaroni and cheese is a vegetable.

Hot dish. Bar cookies. Bottomless pots of coffee. Leaving one’s shoes at the door…It’s also the only place I’ve ever been where, in the winter, the bars and nightclubs have huge promotional signs advertising meat raffles...Yeah, I swear I’m not making that up.

Even so, we just returned from eight days with my husband’s family, and I was more aware than ever of the need to balance the Colgate with the Crest. How many times do I unthinkingly convey to my daughter the notion that Crest is not as good? She watches me so closely. How often do I roll my eyes, or sigh too heavily, mocking Crest’s inoffensive minty flavor or proven cavity fighting ability?

They’re a part of her, too. She certainly is a lot like her daddy. And having spent so much of my childhood so far away from extended family, I’m really very happy that she gets to see hers so often. So, here’s my pledge to be less rigidly Colgate in my thinking.

But maybe someone else – a new mom, or newlywed – may read this and benefit from my odd foray into dental hygiene advice, which I will sum up as follows: You marry a whole family, not just an individual. If you’re lucky, you like them and they like you. If you’re really lucky, you find that their value systems aren’t all that different from your own, even if they do put their baking potatoes and onions in the refrigerator.

If you’re exceptionally lucky, you’ll find you’ve married someone whose family uses the same kind of toothpaste. But they probably squeeze from the middle.

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