A Tooth Fairy Primer

Losing a tooth doesn’t have to be painful—especially when it’s not your own.  But I remember how unprepared I felt when my daughter came home from school one day and proudly opened her mouth to display the brand new gap where one of her lower teeth had once resided.  I had such fond memories of the tooth fairy from my childhood (well, as fond of memories you can have about someone you’ve never met) and I wanted my daughter to have the same experience.  But there were so many questions and concerns:  what was the going rate for a tooth these days (was a dollar for the first tooth and a quarter for each subsequent tooth sufficient, or had the tooth fairy too fallen prey to inflation?); what if I forgot to make the tooth/money swap one night (I’ve never been good under pressure); and worse—what if I got caught red-handed?

Fortunately, on the advice of other moms I knew, I had gone to the bank and gotten ten dollars worth of gold dollar coins to have on hand (these can also be procured from older postage machines that still accept and make change for cash).  I had also had the foresight to stash away a two dollar bill I received as change months before.  I decided for the first tooth I would give my daughter the two dollar bill and one gold dollar.  So I was set in the compensation department. 

It may be my writer’s background, but the thing I was most excited about was creating a persona for my daughter’s personal tooth fairy so that I could leave her notes from the tooth fairy after each lost tooth.  First, I came up with a name.  After researching fairy names online, I came up with the name “Azalea Primrose” for it’s flowery yet slightly puritanical feel.  Then I came up with a back story for Azalea Primrose:  I decided to make her fresh out of tooth fairy school and something of a ditz.  (I did this for practical reasons.  I figured if I ever accidentally forgot to make the switch one night, it could easily be explained away by the mere fact that Azalea was a tooth fairy novice; she couldn’t be held to the standards of other, more experienced tooth fairies.)  I found a whimsical font to type the note in and printed the note in purple ink. 

In the first letter, channeling Azalea Primrose, I focused on introducing myself as my daughter’s tooth fairy, how excited I was for her to be my very first “assignment,” and complimenting her on what a wonderful job she was doing taking care of her teeth.  (In subsequent notes, I had more fun with it: giving my daughter friendship advice that “coincidentally” mirrored issues she was facing with her own friends and recounting fanciful stories of Azalea’s experiences with the other kids she tooth fairied for.) 

Making the drop/switch was complicated, to say the least.  It took several attempts of me peeking into my daughter’s room under the guise that I was “checking on her” before I found her sound asleep enough that I was able to tiptoe in and make the switch undetected.  Later, as other teeth were lost, my daughter developed an inability to fall asleep on tooth fairy nights, so excited was she to try and “catch” the tooth fairy, that on numerous occasions I was forced to military crawl into her room, once getting stuck there for forty minutes until I finally heard the reliable sound of her deep sleep breathing.  Another time, my husband had to create a diversion to get me out of there.  (Yes, after spending forty minutes hunkered down on your child’s floor trying not to move a muscle, you develop drills and diversion tactics with the hubby.)  And still another time, my daughter actually caught me lying on the floor beside her bed.  I told her I liked to listen to her sleep.  (Clearly I’m not the best at fabricating lies on the fly.)

But truthfully, the most difficult part about being the tooth fairy is keeping my daughter convinced that the tooth fairy really does exist.  Turns out, six to seven year olds are a lot more savvy than they used to be.  We have had several conversations that go something like this:

Daughter:  “Mommy, do you believe in the tooth fairy?”

Me:  “Why, yes, I do.”

Daughter:  “But do you ever think sometimes like, maybe she’s not real?  Like maybe… she’s you?”

My husband and I have had several conversations about it as well. They go something like this:

Husband:  “Stop lying to the kid!  You’re going to turn her into a freak!”

But I think there is something magical about believing in the tooth fairy.  There is something magical about believing that there is a fairy out there who loves you so much that your discarded baby teeth mean something to her—so much so that she’s willing to pay you cold, hard cash for them.  And in that respect, doesn’t the tooth fairy really exist in all of us moms?  Those tiny, little milk teeth (weird how they look so much smaller outside of your child’s mouth, don’t you think?) mean the world to us.  And losing them represents that our child has entered a new phase in his/her life—marking the completion of the transition from baby to big kid.  So maybe the tooth fairy is not about our child after all.  Maybe it’s about creating a myth that helps our kids stay innocent for just a little longer until mentally, we are able to truly accept the transition.  And to that end, what’s a little white lie?