The Tooth Fairy and Other Fun Lies

Photo by Todd Cravens on Unsplash

My 5-year-old son lost his first tooth yesterday, and A: how dare he?! Who gave him permission to get so big? But once I had sat with that feeling for a bit, it led to B: what was I going to do about the Tooth Fairy?

For someone who’s been parenting for more than a decade, I’ve gotten away with surprisingly little pretense about fantasy helpers. My ex and I did the Tooth Fairy thing with my oldest, but she was a born skeptic and never believed in it for a moment, so we could drop the act immediately. She much preferred dealing with us directly and negotiated for us to leave old and/or weird coins for her coin collection in exchange for teeth. We never celebrated Christmas or Easter in a way that required any kind of personification of Santa or the Easter Bunny. I am extremely opposed to Elf on the Shelf because what kind of creepy fucking panopticon shit is that?

When our second child was 1 year old and still in the process of tooth acquisition, my partner and his co-parent entered our parenting constellation. Where my ex and I were simply too lazy and uninspired to fully commit to the bit with fantasy helpers, our new teammates were staunchly opposed to lying to children on ethical grounds. Usually I’m the one with the myth takes, but theirs was honestly a relief for me. I’m a terrible liar with the poker face of a trigger-happy venus flytrap, so I prefer not to lie for both moral and practical reasons. Also, I had become increasingly uncomfortable over the years with how maintaining the fantasy of Santa/the Tooth Fairy/the Easter Bunny always seemed to be labor that fell to the female parent in a heterosexual couple while actively occluding that labor. It’s one thing for our labor to be invisible, now we have to explicitly mask it?! Fuck that noise.

We all agreed on a protocol: we would be completely straightforward with our kids that Santa (or whoever) wasn’t real, but also that pretending Santa was real was a game a lot of families like to play, and we have a strict family policy against griefing in any form. So don’t camp out resources and don’t tell your classmates their parents are actually Santa.

Which brings us back to yesterday. My son lost his tooth at school and returned to us wearing it inside a tooth-shaped container on a necklace, which implies that his kindergarten teachers are extremely prepared for this eventuality. He said, “The Tooth Fairy is going to come and take it tonight!” and my partner’s slightly younger and more pedantic five-year-old said, “The Tooth Fairy isn’t real, remember? That’s just a game other families play!”

I told him that he’d still get a special gift for his first tooth and suggested a shark stuffie, because of how sharks lose and replace their teeth. (Which is so much less horrifying than the reality of human teeth, and how adult teeth are inside the jaws of babies, a thing I try not to think about too much. It lives in a tightly-clamped tooth-shaped container necklace in my mind palace, along with the horrifying donkey hand-puppet with a full set of human teeth that squirted water our of its mouth that my dentist father used to bring to my elementary school to terrorize me and my classmates teach kids about proper brushing technique. I sort of want to link to it, to share my pain, but I’m going to wait until the end of this to give you time to prepare yourself.)

My son countered by asking me for a narwhal and reminded me that narwhal horns are actually teeth, because honestly all my children are pedantic as hell, who am I kidding. So I brought up the website for Squishable, my second-favorite plush company. Jellycat still wins.

What the Puff?

To my relief, Squishable has seven different narwhal options. One is a just raccoon in a narwhal costume (why?), and two were the wrong size, but that left four perfectly good options. My son immediately selected the worst one: the narwhal in a donut. As a dentist’s daughter who kind of got used to the taste of the weird sugar-free lollipops he gave out at his front desk after cleanings, I felt deeply uncomfortable with giving my kid a donut stuffie to celebrate his lost tooth. But I don’t believe in demonizing sugar, so I added it to my cart.

As I started to add shipping information, though, my son said, “I kind of wish the Tooth Fairy was coming.” He sounded distinctly disappointed. So my partner said, “If you really want, we can play the Tooth Fairy game.” My son immediately perked up and said yes, he wanted to play. He’d rather have some money under his pillow than a new stuffie.

We grilled him to make sure he really, really understood this was an either-or situation, but he held firm. He wanted to play the Tooth Fairy game. Finally we gave up and accepted that he’s not a rational economic actor and we have to let our kids make their own bad choices. So that night at bedtime he put his tooth under his pillow. A few hours later, I went to make the switch, and my partner asked, “Can I be the Tooth Fairy?” Since I’ve been the Tooth Fairy before, I let him have this one. I did make him wear some child-sized costume dragon wings, though, so the next morning we could honestly tell him a winged creature had come into his room and traded the tooth for cash. (And also because making him wear too-small dragon wings is a tiny hit of the chaos I crave.) This morning my son came in, delightedly waving around his $20 — Tooth Fairy inflation is nuts, man — and then promptly forgot it in our bed when he went to get dressed for school.

When I teach myth classes, someone always asks if the ancient Greeks and Romans “really believed” their myths, and the answer is decidedly 🤷‍♀️. But after watching my kid… you’ve got to assume that whether or not they really believed, on some level, they wanted to. Because it’s fun. And it’s entirely possible to both believe and not believe at the same time, to take part in the ritual and enjoy the pleasure and connection it brings without needing proof in the supernatural.

The whole experience has been joyfully ambivalent for me. I’ve had to reckon with a surprising amount of internal resistance to all of my son’s preferences, a stark reminder that your children aren’t extensions of you. Sure, sometimes they resemble you, when their eyes crinkle a certain way or they hate the same things you used to hate but have since been forced to accept as facts of life. But even with those resemblances, they’re their own delightful tiny people who will never stop surprising and baffling you with their unexpected wisdom and humor and terrible choices.

And now that you’ve had time: here’s the donkey puppet, after a button, because you can never really be prepared.

Bafflingly, the description on the website reads, “Forgo the boring, old-school denture demos that give kids nightmares and update your approach to young patients with Child Smile by Beaver!” So what kind of nightmare fuel were they using before?!

You can’t say I didn’t warn you.