He’d been fretting about the tooth for weeks, since before Christmas, insisting it was ready when it barely budged.
A zillion wiggles later the stubborn baby tooth hung on a thread of bloody gums.
The possibility of another Tooth Fairy visit had been exhilarating to my seven-year-old, but the reality of yanking that sucker out and maybe bleeding to death in front of the bathroom mirror was another matter altogether. Biting into anything with even the mildest amount of resistance was akin to a root canal, feeling the way the tooth twisted unnaturally beneath his tongue made his stomach turn somersaults.
“It hurts. I don’t know what to do,” he wailed theatrically.
I offered to help. When I was a kid, my grandfather would reach under a loose tooth in a mock attempt to wiggle it then pop that baby out with a flick of his fingernail. It was as horrifying as it was painless. I’ve extracted plenty of milk teeth during my own stint as a parent and could’ve ended my son’s ordeal lickety-split. Instead he opted to go it alone, gripping the tooth with a toilet paper square and for half-an-hour working it gently out of its place with a trembling hand.
After five minutes of watching him wince at his reflection, I walked away, fully expecting the tooth to fall out of its own accord while he slept. When he burst in to the kitchen with what looked like a bloody Tic-Tac held out in front of him, I squealed with relief for him.
“Finally.”
He looked a little pale. This boy of mine has never fared well at the sight of his own blood, so I took him to rinse and showed him how quickly the hole stopped oozing.
Minutes later, the tooth was securely zip-locked and placed beneath his pillow, awaiting The Exchange.
He’s at that age when he is fully committed to believing – magic, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, monsters and myths – he buys it all and I am charged with perpetuating the hoax keeping those fantasies alive. The Tooth Fairy is a cinch compared to Santa; no months of cautious purchasing and strategic concealment, no late night wrapping marathons, no letters to be forged in the fat man’s swooping script; a simple tooth for cash swap and the deed was done.
In the morning my still sleepy eyed boy was clutching a fiver as he stumbled out to show me the Tooth Fairy did indeed stop by for a visit. Hooray. Luckily for him the Tooth Fairy still had some change from her last trip to the grocery store and he was spared the disappointment of having to wait an additional day while she found an opening for him in her already busy fairy schedule.
On the ride home from school that afternoon, he informed me he wasn’t the only one the Tooth Fairy had stopped in to visit. Little Miss So-and-So aka The Hair Puller had also lost a tooth recently, a front tooth that fetched a whooping 20 bucks on the dental exchange.
Twenty dollars.
“She says it’s because her teeth are really white and really shiny,” he reasoned. “I’m going to have to brush with your minty grown-up toothpaste instead of the kids’ one so I can get 20 next time too.”
Uh. Yeah. Sure. Maybe?
I’m all for igniting his passion for dental hygiene, but I can’t justify putting $20 in his pocket every time his mouth pushes out a tooth especially when I still owe my twelve-year-old $15 in back pay for three molars lost during a brief two week stretch when I was simply cash-less. It’s just not a priority when she knows the money comes out of my wallet and not some supernatural financial institution.
But I wondered if maybe we parents couldn’t come up with a system or a general consensus rather, of what a baby tooth is realistically worth. Should there be some kind of criteria? Deductions for chips and cracks? Cavities? Weird stains or jagged edges?
It would just be nice if we were all on the same page.
And while we’re on the topic, what exactly does that weirdo fairy do with all those little teeth?
