Mary FortuneIt's Tooth Fairy season again at my house, which means I was recently catapulted from sleep at 5 a.m. by the realization that no one did Tooth Fairy.
"Jim," I whispered urgently. "I didn't do Tooth Fairy. Did you do Tooth Fairy?"
Oh yeah, he's awake now, and cursing mildly. "No. Do you have a dollar?"
I do have a dollar, which is unusual but lucky. I tiptoe through the dark house like a cartoon burglar, clutching my dollar and hoping the kid isn't having one of his wakeful spells. He has them sometimes. He'll wander out to the couch and lie down, then wonder aloud at breakfast how he ended up there.
Nope, he's out cold. I slip my hand under his pillow, slide the dollar under and grab the tooth, which is inside a little velvet bag dedicated especially to this purpose.
"Done," I announce to my husband as I slip back into our room. "That was close."
The Tooth Fairy once had to write a deeply apologetic note to Ben after she fell asleep watching "Saturday Night Live" and completely forgot about his tooth. She left him a bonus dollar that time, a form of interest for the extra night his tooth spent under the pillow. Guilt is expensive.
I still have that note, and the notes our boys have written to the Tooth Fairy, asking her to check for cavities, thanking her in advance for the money or, on one exploitative occasion, pointing out that this is the very last baby tooth and there should be something pretty great under the pillow in recognition of this milestone. My older son never misses an opportunity to generate income.
I keep the notes in a little box on my dresser. Which is also where I keep the teeth. And now you're judging me. I can feel it. Yes, I'm a weirdo, I know. But I can't make myself throw them away. They're wrapped in tissue in their respective little drawstring bags, tiny pieces of my long-gone babies.
My older son's set was complete years ago. He's 14 and the proud owner of a wide, orthodontically perfected smile. My younger son, who's 9, has five more to lose, and I'm pretty sure four of them are wiggly at the moment.
When I polled my friends to find out what they do with their kids' teeth, the answers ranged from bury them in the yard (good for the soil, apparently?) to throw them away to keep them.
"What did you do with my teeth?" I called to ask my mom. She hollered over her shoulder to my dad, "What did we do with the kids' teeth?" Then returned to report, "We threw them away. Eventually."
"So you saved them, but then you threw them away?"
"I guess so. Why? Do you want them?"
"No, ew. Why would I want my old teeth?"
Our conversation got my mother poking around on the Internet, and she found a device called The Tooth Trap, where you can shove your kids' old teeth into a replica mouth and keep them that way.
"Gross," I said. "Like reconstructing a crime scene? I'll just keep them wrapped in tissue."
I vividly remember watching these little teeth grow in -- and all the attendant gnawing, drooling and wailing. We worked for these teeth and, now that my boys are shedding their childhoods, I find I just can't bring myself to pitch them.
"What do you think the Tooth Fairy does with your teeth?" I recently asked Ben.
"She cleans them and keeps them so she can look at them," he said.
Close enough.
Contact Mary Fortune at thirtytensomething.blogspot.com.