The Most Unreliable of All the Fairies

primary_teeth — You people are costing me a hundred bucks! Per kid!

To all of you parents out there who are leading your children to believe that the Tooth Fairy steals silently in the window at night while they dream, drips glitter in her wake and exchanges, via magic, five dollars for their precious, well-cared-for, and dramatically-parted-with teeth: STOP IT! What the hell is wrong with you? Do you know how many teeth children will lose before they have all their permanent teeth? Twenty. Twenty! There are multiple children in my house losing teeth at the same time, plus one in braces, and you people are trying to break me with your five dollars per tooth nonsense. Add it up.

The kids are constantly telling us how the Tooth Fairy left someone in their class five dollars, or seven dollars, or a Nintendo DS, or a pony. For five bucks, the Tooth Fairy better be sliding in some pre-orthodontia. Two bucks is the going rate in our house, unless the tooth has a cavity, in which case you get nada.

I am the world’s worst Tooth Fairy. That’s not entirely correct: CC and I together are the world’s worst Tooth Fairy.

The kids lose their teeth when we’re not around. I have never, not once, been present for the losing of a tooth when it wasn’t forcibly removed by the dentist. I don’t even know if they’re telling the truth about losing the teeth or not because I can’t keep the holes in their mouths straight and? The kids have this uncanny ability to actually lose the teeth that have come out of their mouths. When I was a kid I never had a tooth just up and go missing. It’s beyond my comprehension.

Believers don’t understand why they need to tell their parents they’ve lost a tooth because they think the Tooth Fairy has it all under control. Even when we do get notified, we forget, or else we don’t have any money on us because they already took it all.

Saturday #5 lost a tooth and didn’t tell us. I only found out about it when he woke up sad on Sunday morning. Luckily we have a whole backstory to cover the Tooth Fairy’s ass. Or throw her under the bus, depending on how you look at it.

#5: The Tooth Fairy didn’t come again.

CC: Son, the Tooth Fairy is the most unreliable of all the Fairies.

Me: Yes, she graduated at the bottom of her class in Fairy School.

CC: She totally would have flunked out if Santa didn’t help her cheat on the final.

Me: Because she never studied for her Fairy tests.

CC: She couldn’t; she was drunk.

Me: That may be why she didn’t come last night. She may have been too drunk.

CC: He. The Tooth Fairy is actually a man, did you know that?

Me: Yeah, he wears a cheap, ripped up tutu and you can see his leg hair through his tights because he doesn’t shave his legs.

CC: And his wand is bent.

#5: How do you know?

Me: Some nights he wanders in here when none of you guys have even lost a tooth, smelling like cheap whiskey and cigarettes and asks if I can break a twenty.

CC: Then he goes home to his tooth room and rolls around on top of his pile of teeth until he passes out. I’m sure that’s what happened.

Me: Why don’t you go put it back under your pillow and try again tonight?

#5 looked skeptical, but took his tooth in its little plastic bag and walked towards his room. Then he turned around.

#5: Do you think maybe the Tooth Fairy will leave three dollars for this tooth because it has blood on it?

Me: There’s blood on most teeth when they fall out. When I was a kid the Tooth Fairy left a quarter.

#5: Yeah, well I think money wasn’t worth very much back then.

I came to find out that in actuality, #1 pulled his tooth out for him. He told me this when the Tooth Fairy didn’t show up for the second night in a row. #5 is willing to place the blame anywhere else so as to exonerate the Tooth Fairy and preserve the money that he knows is coming to him, provided he can keep the Tooth Fairy sort of sober and not pissed off at him. It’s a valuable life skill and I am glad I can help him learn it at such young age.

#5: I bet that the Tooth Fairy has a calendar of when you’re supposed to lose the tooth, and because my sister pulled my tooth out, the Tooth Fairy didn’t know it was out yet. I bet that’s what happened.

Me: I bet you’re right. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened. This is all your sister’s fault, don’t you think?

#5: Probably.

Me: Right, it usually is. But I bet he comes tonight. There’s no way she could have pulled that tooth out of your head more than two days ahead of schedule.

#5: Right. It wouldn’t have come out, right?

Me: Right.

I’ve got to go out now and get change because it’s the third night, and even a drunk gets it right sometimes.

Have some standards, Easter Bunny.

When I was a kid, the Easter Bunny came to my house. He brought my sister and I Easter baskets with jelly beans, chocolate eggs, hollow chocolate bunnies, and small outdoor toys: wooden airplanes, bubbles, chalk, maybe a kite.

He also hid the eggs we had colored.

Apparently, the Easter Bunny doesn’t pull the same routine everywhere. This would have been good to know before I tried to make Easter happen the first year the kids were living with us.

Me: So what do you guys do for Easter?

CC: I dunno, that was their mom’s holiday. I did Christmas. She took care of Easter.

That first year we made a big effort and had the Easter baskets ready when they woke up in the morning.

#1: What’s all this?

Me: Easter baskets. From the Easter Bunny.

#1: Why did the “Easter Bunny” come so early?

Me: What do you mean?

#1: He usually doesn’t come until after church.

Me: {feelings of guilt for doing it wrong, followed by double feelings of guilt for not being a church-going parent} Oh. Well, we can’t go to church because we have to work. Maybe that’s why he came early?

#1: {with heavy note of sarcasm, not really interested in keeping the magic alive} Yeah, usually we would be in the car to go to church like waaay early, and my mom would suddenly remember that she forgot something in the house, and she’d go back inside for like fifteen minutes, and then when we got home from church the “Easter Bunny” would have miraculously delivered the Easter baskets.

Me: Easter is all about the miracles.

That whole forgetting something in the house thing sounded like a good plan. I wondered if I could try it next year. It would probably mean more sleep.

It was when I tried to orchestrate the egg hunt that everything truly fell apart.

Should we hide the eggs inside or outside? The house we were renting wasn’t very big. Also the thought of an indoor hunt terrified me because I’m not known for my housekeeping and it was highly possible that an egg would be hidden and never, ever found. This was before we had dogs. (In retrospect, this was a very valid concern, due to the things I did find when we finally moved, including more than one sandwich under a bed and a sticky rubber octopus in a light fixture that I couldn’t reach).

So we decided outside, which led to the next hard part: when to hide them. If you hide them outside too early, they’ll get eaten by things. If you do it too late, the kids will see you and the cover is blown.

What I didn’t count on is that if you’re not raised with the belief that the Easter Bunny hides the eggs, nothing will convince you otherwise.

For reasons I don’t fully comprehend, it’s much easier for them to adapt beliefs surrounding Christmas and Santa, but regarding the Easter Bunny, it truly is like converting to another religion. Santa at least carries on the spirit of “peace on earth, good will towards man.” The connection between Jesus and Santa is a stretch, but passable in the minds of most kids, especially because of the presents at the end.

The Easter Bunny is nebulous. He has neither sidekicks nor clearly delineated responsibilities. His connection to the tomb is nonexistent. It would be a far enough cry to connect the Easter Bunny with Ostara, but I get it, based on the abundant fertility of bunnies. But connecting the Easter Bunny with Jesus? It would make more sense to have an Easter Zombie. Which my kids would probably relate to better anyway.

Standards. The Easter Bunny needs some goddamn standards.

They’d never done an egg hunt at home. The only egg hunts they had done were at churches or parks with other large groups of kids and they were super-competitive. We tried to hide some easy ones and let them stagger the start youngest to oldest. That only made #1 head immediately to the front, where she found every single front-hidden egg while all her siblings were occupied in the back.

And? They were largely disappointed that only real eggs were hidden. There were supposed to be eggs filled with candy. There were supposed to be eggs filled with money.

Where’s the spec sheet for this holiday? None of this makes any sense.

In spite of me, my kids are good people. They’re forgiving and fun-loving enough that they don’t mind too much if a holiday is different, and they each have a spark of that weird, dark humor that their Dad and I find so endearing. Thankfully, there are a lot of good people looking out for them that not only will steer them away from the Easter Zombie, but who will still speak to me even though I brought it up.

They did get #1 back for finding all the eggs:

A Public Service Announcement

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while. Debating on whether I should even put it out there. It’s got some unflattering pictures (not referring to the baby) but the more difficult part to reconcile is the truth it contains. I don’t know if you’re ready for it, but I feel a tremendous sense of obligation to pass this on.

Here’s a picture of me looking amazed at a baby:

This is a CUTE baby. We didn’t even have to lie to her parents about that; it’s true. I think she’s awesome. She has tater-tot feet and she wears mittens.

I was surprised that when CC and I got married, people began asking me when we were going to have kids.

Me: We have five kids. I think we’re good.

Them: No, I mean your own kids.

Yeah. Because I’m so on top of everything, so incredibly organized and overloaded with resources such as money, time, and patience, that I think what’s truly missing in our lives, with our five kids and two dogs, is an infant.

Nevermind the best twelve bucks CC ever spent.

Nevermind the insult both to me and the kids.

I’m going to tell you something about babies. Something that no one is talking about. It’s the Big Secret About Babies that isn’t discussed in polite company. I already told Little O’s parents, so they knew from way back. My sister, who will be giving birth any second now, knows this truth because it’s already happened to her twice.

We’re talking way beyond narcolepsy, drooling and poop. Lots of people go into the baby thing not knowing this part and they’re shocked when it happens to them. There’s a conspiracy of silence around parenthood that prevents most people from talking about it. The advantage of being a stepmom and jumping in right in the middle is that you don’t have built-in fairy tale fantasies about your babies. You’re faced with stark reality from the very first day. I’m objective. That’s why ima tell you this now.

The best you can hope for, and this is only if you are very, very lucky, is this:

Folks, babies turn into teenagers.