The Day the Tooth Fairy Ruined our Evening

#momguilt washed over me.

You had three weeks — no, five and a half years — to plan for this moment! How are you completely unprepared?

I had been upstairs working when the moment had come. Of course.

Indeed, I did know it was coming, because three weeks prior, our five-and-a-half-year-old daughter had sprinted to me, overcome with glee. It’s no exaggeration to say that she was more excited than anyone has ever been in the history of the world.

“MY TOOTH IS LOOSE!”

For the next three weeks, she wore that loose tooth like the badge of honor, rite of passage it is. (True story: During a trip to Publix, she stopped literally every shopper she saw and told them about her tooth while asking me to wiggle it and show them. Fortunately, we live in a small Southern town filled with people who were ready to celebrate with her.)

And then, yesterday afternoon, I heard commotion downstairs. Cries of celebration. I was upstairs, working. Of course. I ran halfway downstairs. Then I ran back upstairs, grabbed my phone, and ran all the way downstairs.

There she was, proud smile plastered on her face and bloody paper towel stuffed in her mouth.

I went right to work capturing the moment.

Click! Click! Stand still! Click! OK, open your mouth! Click! Turn around? Click! Now smile! Click!

I went back upstairs. It was a Monday afternoon. I had planned to spend it working since my husband didn’t have to.

…Did I stop and celebrate with her?

I couldn’t remember. #momguilt

Feeling guilty about not making her moment special enough, I flipped over to Pinterest and searched for Tooth Fairy Inspiration. Not a great idea, when you’re already feeling inadequate, to turn to Pinterest. This is when that major wave of #momguilt hit.

Yes, I did have five and a half years to prepare for this! Why did I not go to the bank and take out new crisp bills or a shiny coin from this year? Why did I not sew her a tooth pillow? Why did I not order the special monogramed tooth box from Etsy? Why was I so calm downstairs a minute ago when she pulled her tooth? Why didn’t I make a bigger fuss?

There was no time to go to the bank. There was no time to go to Jo-Ann Fabrics and get supplies for a handmade tooth pillow. There was certainly no time to order a monogrammed tooth chest. Why had I thrown away that empty Altoids tin last week? I could have spray painted it and made it a tooth treasure chest!

I rummaged through my jewelry box and found a single gold Sacagawea dollar. I can work with this…she prefers coins to bills anyway! 

As I cooked dinner that evening, I soaked it in vinegar, buffed it with baking soda, and rinsed it off. It looked nice! I started to think that maybe this wouldn’t be a half-baked disaster. Becoming excited, I showed it to my husband.

“Hmmm. It would be nice if it were a 2017 coin. I think I’d like to give her something else.”

But I don’t have anything else because I didn’t think to go to the bank at any point in the last five and a half years and all the bills I can find are crumpled and old and I didn’t make a handmade tooth pillow and I didn’t order a monogrammed tooth chest from Etsy and I don’t even have that old Altoids tin anymore but I did work hard to make the one idea I do have work because did you see the vinegar and the baking soda — coins aren’t usually this shiny, you know — and I’M ALL OUT OF IDEAS AND I FEEL INADEQUATE BECAUSE I’VE BEEN ON PINTEREST.

“She’ll like this fine,” I snapped.

And then, like you do, we fought for a good 10 minutes about the Tooth Fairy.

Sigh. Are we really having this conversation?

Fighting back the sting of Tooth-Fairy-induced tears welling up in my eyes, I sulked off to hide in the laundry room. Hunched over the washing machine, I Googled how to make a wrinkled dollar bill look new again.

Feeling calmer, I emerged from my bunker and met my husband in the kitchen. He didn’t hate the dollar coin. He didn’t want to give her two separate Tooth Fairy offerings as if we’re not one parental team. He wanted to do more than the dollar coin because he wanted to write on a dollar bill (cover your ears, Mr. Steve Mnuchin) to commemorate the occasion, then frame it with a picture of our toothless kid.

Oh. OK. I get that.

So we came up with a plan to find the best dollar we could, combine it with the coin, and put it together with a note from the Tooth Fairy. I snuck upstairs to practice ironing dollars. (Starch — on the front only — and a quick iron worked surprisingly well.) Because I can’t help myself, I also pulled up one of the Pinterest ideas I’d seen: an origami heart made from a dollar bill that holds a quarter in the center.

And so there I was, hunched over on the white tile of my bathroom floor, doing the Tooth Fairy’s bidding an hour and a half past my bed time. A couple hundred folds later, I had a dollar-bill origami heart! The gold dollar coin fit, sort of, where the quarter was supposed to go.  I showed it to my husband, and his face lit up. “That’s so cool!”

But where could we write on it?

“We’ll write on it later,” he said.

Together, we crafted a note from the Tooth Fairy: “Congratulations on losing your first tooth! Keep up the good work brushing your teeth.”

And together, we put the origami heart/coin holder in the envelope. It occurred to me that it was cool — cooler than either of our ideas had been on their own. I snuck the envelope under her pillow and removed the tooth that was waiting for me. I thought of how sacred the moment was, and how much work marriage and parenting are, and how symbolic our compromise was. Folded so intricately, his contribution held tightly to mine and they couldn’t be easily separated.

Unless you’re five-and-a-half and you wake up at 6:45 the next morning to find an envelope under your pillow. In that case, you rip into it, immediately disassemble the heart, pull out the coin, unfurl the dollar, and say, “cool!” before your mom gets a good picture.

Sigh.