One school morning, my third son woke up uncharacteristically cantankerous. This kid is generally like a grumpy bear in the mornings, but this particular morning he was more like a bear who’d been woken from hibernation three minutes before he was supposed to be woken. (I imagine that bear would be upset; I feel upset every time I wake up three minutes before my alarm goes off.)
He stalked around the house grumbling under his breath. I tried to listen, but I couldn’t quite make out anything of note. I assumed he’d feel better after breakfast, but he sat at the breakfast table and moped.
“Everything okay, baby?” I said.
He shook his head.
“Want to talk about it?”
He shook his head.
I try not to pry. I like to let them talk when they’re ready, but something was clearly bothering him, so I said, “You didn’t sleep all that well?” intending to utilize the process of elimination, which generally works for a seven-year-old.
“I slept just fine,” he said in decidedly snappy voice.
I cocked my head, squinted my eyes, stirred the oatmeal. Waited.
He said, “The tooth fairy didn’t leave me any money.” He held up something tiny. It was a tooth.
Oh, no.
I likely should have known, immediately, what was wrong; this is a standard happenstance in our home. Someone loses a tooth—someone is always losing a tooth, it seems—puts it under their pillow with high hopes for prosperity, and they wake up the next morning to nothing but the tooth.
The tooth fairy has been a bit flaky in our home.
Who would have ever thought the tooth fairy could be so complicated? I sure never did.
In our house, teeth fall out every other day (that’s a slight exaggeration—but only slight), but the tooth fairy very rarely visits.
There are a variety of reasons for this: She doesn’t carry cash, she’s much more forgetful than she used to be (she’s very old by now), and the tooth can’t always be found.
Husband and I always warn whichever boy has lost the tooth to leave it in a certain place where it will be easy to find when they go to bed and need to transfer it to the spot under their pillow. But the problem is that there is always an abundance of curious brothers manhandling that tooth with a bloody bit of root attached to it; they think it’s the most amazing thing. They don’t always remember to put it back where it was.
I’m convinced that someone in my house (certainly not the tooth fairy) has a tooth repository somewhere, and it likely looks like something out of a horror film. I haven’t found it yet, and I’m glad. Creepy kids.
The cost of teeth these days is incredible. It seems that inflation has ballooned the prize that kids expect to be waiting beneath their pillow when they wake after a visit from the tooth fairy. My sons come home talking about how the tooth fairy left twenty dollars under their friend’s pillow, and they’re all excited about this because they think it will happen to them, too. My poor kids don’t realize that there are different tooth fairies working the world and the tooth fairy assigned to our house does not leave twenty-dollar bills. She usually leaves an IOU—or nothing. So disappointing.
I’m pretty sure that some of my kids have prematurely stopped believing in the tooth fairy because of our shortcomings, but, well, what can you do. Parenting is hard even without all the required extras.
In the last four years, the tooth fairy assigned to our home has demonstrated some of her principles. You’ve already heard one of them: She doesn’t adjust much for inflation. Kids get five dollars for losing their first tooth (maybe) and a dollar every tooth after that. I’d say this is enough adjustment for inflation; I got a quarter for every tooth when I was a kid (and I tell my kids this every chance I get—they’re lucky). So even though a kid can’t buy much for a dollar, that’s as much as our tooth fairy will splurge. If my sons would actually save their dollars in a piggy bank or something, they’d have thirty-two dollars by the time it was all over.
The future, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that much to them yet.
The tooth fairy is also usually late. This is because she has a billion things going on in her house. She has kids she needs to send off to school, a house she needs to clean, clothes she needs to wash, work she needs to do, kids she needs to bathe and put down to bed, and, by the end of the evening, her brain and her body have been emptied out; not only does she not remember that someone lost a tooth, but she also has no energy left to lift herself from the bed, tiptoe down the hall, and slip a dollar underneath a pillow. Add to this exhaustion-complication the fact that the tooth fairy usually goes to bed before her older children do, so when would she sneak? True, she gets up at 4:15 every morning, but by that time she’s definitely forgotten that someone lost a tooth.
It really is a tragic circumstance.
When my sons wake on a morning after losing a tooth, they first check their pillow, to their great disappointment. They next come storming into our room or down the stairs, wherever Husband or I happen to be. They then posit that one of their brothers must have stolen the money the tooth fairy left under their pillow, because there was nothing this morning when they checked, after which Husband and I will exchange a look and one or the other of us will say, “She just added it to your allowance.”
“How much?” the boy will say.
We’ll shrug. “A dollar,” we’ll say.
If they complain, we remind them that the tooth fairy did say their daddy or I could take the dollar and use it for ourselves if the recipient was not grateful, after which they will zip their mouth closed and be, perhaps, marginally grateful for a dollar they didn’t have yesterday.
Husband and I don’t put too much pressure on ourselves to keep up this ruse; it is, after all, a ruse. One of these days our sons will know why the tooth fairy doesn’t always make it here on time. For now, we congratulate the son who’s lost a tooth, examine the one coming in, and bask in that adorable gap-toothed grin.
And, in the backs of our minds, we continue hoping that we never, ever stumble across that nightmare stash of lost teeth.
This is an excerpt from If These Walls Could Talk, the fifth book of humor essays in the Crash Test Parents series.
