Nothing But the Tooth

One of the many stark and sobering realities of parenthood is that you never know when you're going to be ambushed by a question you can't, or don't want to, answer. Even when you dodge a bullet, you can be pretty sure the next chamber's loaded.

There must have been a logical trigger, but it sure seemed random to me when my daughter asked me the other day, "When you're the president, can you smoke?" I should probably note that, in our zeal to inoculate the young'ns against sundry vices, we seem to have created a state of affairs where they recoil in horror when they see a smoker -- or someone with a "needle tattoo" (not to be confused with the rub-on kind).

I told her that the president, or any adult, is free to do more or less what he wishes... which brought the unexpected follow-up, "Well, it's a good thing at least Barack Obama doesn't smoke."

Of course, 21st-century campaigns in the 21st-century media leave few vestiges of privacy, so I was aware that although he's been trying to quit, the Most Powerful Man in the Free World has been known to sneak an occasional butt. So I said, "Well, actually he does smoke a little, sometimes..."

OK, in hindsight I probably should've let that one "lie", so to speak; I know it had some kind of consequence because within hours my wife was asking me, "Why did you tell her the president smokes?"

Fundamentally, I believe in telling kids the truth. Age-appropriate truth, yes, but truth. But it sure is hard when you consider how many built-in lies we're already stuck with. We briefly considered trying to get around Santa, since it's a really high priority for us to emphasize Jesus as the Reason for the Season... but it turned out that sealing them in Tupperware for the last 2 months of each year was impractical and interfered with homework. Then there's the Easter Bunny -- a fondly-remembered staple of my wife's childhood -- and of course the Tooth Fairy.

On top of the strain of maintaining a series of fictions year-round, it can get pretty darned expensive. I am sure that we buy more presents when accounting for Santa than we would otherwise. And they both have a mouthful of teeth.

My son made the tooth fairy thing relatively easy on us. After a couple of rounds of a dollar under the pillow, he said, "Dad, can the tooth fairy bring me stickers instead of money?" In fact, he didn't even figure out that he wasn't getting new stickers. Since he caught me off-guard without an opportunity to contact the tooth fairy, I slipped him some stickers out of the existing stock in the Sticker Box... OK, I'm not proud of that one. My daughter, however, is (as always) a different story, a tougher nut to crack.

She is gleeful each time a tooth starts to wobble, and she will worry it continually till it's out. This last tooth was only a little bit loose when she came home from school with a tale of having been knocked down and getting the tooth knocked out; there's a chance that some or all of that is actually true. And that -- don't hate me for saying this -- is where the story really begins.

But it really gets sticky about 4:30 the following morning, when I am awakened by my daughter's piteous wailing in the hallway: we have forgotten to put the tooth under her pillow, and All Is Lost tooth-fairy-wise. Apparently she completes her rounds in the Northeast US before 4:30am EST.

No, no, baby, of course we'll take care of it... I'll go get the tooth right now and I'm sure we can still catch her. So I stumble downstairs in the dark, leaving the lights off so as not to overpower myself with the glare -- and while I'm there, I snatch a bill out of my wallet. Then I return upstairs to put the tooth under the pillow (did you know that the school now supplies a tiny plastic 'treasure chest' to store the tooth in? wonder what the annual budget for that looks like), and I slip the bill to my even less-conscious wife to plant under the pillow, so I can rejoin my regularly-scheduled coma, already in progress.

In the morning -- or as I like to call it, about 39 winks later -- I notice that she is surprisingly closed-mouthed about the tooth fairy's visit. For one thing, finding a penny on the ground is for her a major occasion for gloating to her brother, and for another, "closed-mouthed" is not her natural state by any stretch of the imagination. Something is nagging at the corners of my brain (and yes, my brain is a perfect equilateral cube), so I check my wallet.

I am a math major by training and a computer programmer by profession, so while I'm not exactly a 'neat' person I am in many respects orderly. The bills in my wallet are always faced identically and arranged from smallest to largest... and the smallest remaining bill is a $20.

I share my growing sense of dread with The Mom, so a little later she asks, "Hey, did the tooth fairy come? What did she bring you?" At first reluctant, as well as practiced in the arts of dissembling, she eventually comes clean: "Yeah, um, I got $20." My wife was able to convince her she owed us $10 from an earlier toy purchase -- but since she did owe us $10, I don't feel like I got anything "back", exactly.

So I'm thinking that from now on, the tooth fairy may be bringing an itemized invoice that shows her account status against an advance for the next 19 teeth (although she doesn't even have 19 to go, so I guess the rate's going up in any case). Knowing my daughter, it won't be long, since she will probably contrive to be "knocked down" weekly now that it's proven to be such a lucrative scam.