I held my daughter up to better see the passing parade. She was still small enough to lift high with my hands and I watched her reaction from below, her joy, growing in the morning light. The colour and noise moved past. “You’re missing it,” I heard someone say. But I had never seen something as beautiful as that; it seemed perfect, her smile looking down at me.
My daughter appeared above me again the following morning, though something had changed. Her mouth, blood-streaked, opened to reveal a gap. She had lost her first tooth. We celebrated but I felt something else as well; it all changes from here. I wondered if it was grief.
“Do we give this to the toothy fairy?” my daughter asked. I couldn’t quite remember. There can be something ridiculous about the ritual; invoking night imps, exchanging cash for body parts. Some parents hoard the teeth in tins or wear them on necklaces. Some argue it’s unethical; “You’re lying to children” or, my personal favourite, “This is how capitalism commodifies the bodies of workers.”
I don’t know what to make of the tooth fairy. I held the fallen tooth in my hand; why do we do this, and what do I do with this feeling?
My partner did the tooth fairy routine for our oldest, though in a cashless, modern way when circumstances required. I know parents who have committed to the bit, like leaving little footprints in glitter by the pillow. Others look at this and declare it all gross or superstitious, almost cultic.
Some decry the deceitful nature of it, and research shows children can learn to lie from their parents. But psychologists have found imaginary friends and worlds are healthy for children, something that decreases around the age of seven.
What is fact and what is pretend isn’t always clear in childhood and there are variations of the imaginative ritual going back centuries. A mouse is said to collect the teeth in France, Belgium and Spain. Sometimes they are thrown atop the family house to be collected by birds or mythical figures (the most disturbing of which is a character known as “Mary-in-the-roof”).
Sometimes it’s almost religious, with teeth offered to a saint or a god, cast towards the sky in parts of the Middle East and Asia. The standard tooth fairy was the invention of a playwright a century ago but there appears to be a universal instinct to do something with these fallen teeth, and to treat them as sacred.
We left the tooth beneath the pillow as my daughter’s eyes closed that night. Parents can lament that first gap, when that “perfect smile” is gone. Small children can be held up as an ideal, as little angels. This is like saying goodbye to a small part of them, the little child now gone.
I question that sense of grief. My daughter is still here, after all, but it’s this moment that has passed. It seemed perfect and I missed it. This isn’t grief I’m feeling. It’s remorse. I wasn’t watching and now it’s too late.
I don’t remember having been the tooth fairy. I don’t remember much of it at all. My daughter was born into a pandemic, entered kindergarten in a cost-of-living crisis. She started school with diagnoses and deaths in the family. Years have moved past. I have missed so much.
I hold my daughter up one morning to better see the gap. The gum is healing. I ask what she makes of this ritual. She already knows it’s the parents. I ask her why we might do it. “To make joy,” she replies, smiling.
My daughter isn’t perfect; she’s a kid. She screams. She crafts. She awards herself wonky micro-bangs before important events (I think they’re good). She’s not an angel, she’s more. She’s human. She’s changing, as everything does. That’s the beauty of it.
The tooth fairy is ridiculous but all rituals are, and the superstitious and the sacred are often the same thing. Children have small teeth and big imaginations, growing out of both, and they might need a ritual along the way. I wonder if parents do too. I do, not as a funeral but as celebration. There is so much more to come.
Years pass like a parade. It all moves by so quickly. I take this memory of my daughter’s joy and lift it up, not as an ideal to grieve, but an offering, to the sky, to God, whatever is above. This is my ritual. I am exchanging remorse for anticipation, because my little girl isn’t gone, she’s growing. I will watch for that smile.
I’m not missing a thing.