My Mother and the Tooth Fairy

My parents always told us that Santa was pretend. Same with the Easter Bunny. They wanted our holy days to be about real miracles rather than fairy magic, a decision they made despite a host of unpleasant social consequences. Our society may embrace multiculturalism in other areas, but NOT in Santa.

Given their frank honesty about jolly Old Saint Nick, my childish self credited my parents with unimpeachable veracity about supernatural creatures. I saw a world of parents who told made-up stories for unfathomable reasons, while my parents were the cool-eyed skeptics, investigative reporters in a world of storytellers.

Or so I assumed.

But my mother, while she was utterly unmoved by Christmas and Easter fairy tales, did indulge in one bit of magical chicanery. She loved the Tooth Fairy.

I’m really not sure why. Perhaps it seemed a safely secular myth to her. Perhaps it was a remnant from her childhood that she simply didn’t have any particular theological objections to. In any case, the Tooth Fairy featured largely in our house.

My mother is a nurse, and like all nurses, she knows dozens of stories about freak accidents resulting in emergency room visits. Filed away in her brain are a few horrible stories about the randomly tragic things that can happen if a loose tooth is not promptly removed (choking! infection! trapped in the ear while sleeping!), so frequently she offered us a choice: let her pull the tooth now in exchange for a coin, or wait until it fell out and gamble on the effects of inflation on a capricious Tooth Fairy.

I usually chose the Tooth Fairy.

Sometimes she was distressed at this choice. If my tooth was very loose, she worried. She would ask to feel how loose the tooth was. I would ask her to promise not to pull it. With eyes full of sincerity, she would promise that she would “only feel it.”

She lied every time.

It was so distressing to me, this realization that my mother lied. She was so honest in all other respects. Over the tooth-losing years, I gradually learned that in this one thing, she was utterly untrustworthy. If I let her touch that tooth, she was going to yank it out. Like the discovery that she would kick us if we tickled her feet and she would not be sorry afterward, part of coming to terms with the world as a hard and cold place was the knowledge that my mother could and would lie.

Years later, far past the customary age of my peers, I found out that the Tooth Fairy was not real. My younger sister, always quicker than I was at picking up on such things, made some comment about the fictional nature of the Tooth Fairy, and a light went on in my brain. Of course the Tooth Fairy couldn’t be real. What was I thinking?

Discovering that my mother had been storytelling all along had no effect on me. I had already lost my innocence with that deceitfully yanked tooth.

(I was out of post ideas until I read Madmarriage’s recent post about her son’s discovery of the Tooth Fairy conspiracy. My mother reads my blog regularly, and this post will have her vociferously hooting objections, arguing facts, and challenging my recollections. The entire family will be drawn into the debate. There will be phone calls crisscrossing the country, as my sisters and brother argue for or against the accuracy of my memory. My mother will adamantly defend her own honor to family, and tell all of her friends about it. This post will, in short, absolutely make her day.)