The Tooth Fairy Forgot to Come Last Night

A note for the tooth fairy
May 2015

The tooth fairy forgot to come last night.

Mica walked into my bedroom this morning, waking me with his sad, sweet little face and shuffling footy pajama’ed feet. He said with the subtlest chokey voice, “The tooths fairy didn’t come lastht night.”

His twin sister put her arm around him in an effort to comfort him. She looked even more upset than he did

I wanted to punch that stupid tooth fairy in the goddamn throat. I wanted to shake her until the glittery dandruff crap fell off of her wings and onto my hands. The last time I heard, she’s a stay-at-home fairy. What does she do with her goddamn day? Or her evening for that matter? How hard could it be to drop off a quarter under some kid’s pillow?

Note for the fairy
“What do you look like. I love you. What do you like. Write your answer.”
May 2015

I was at a total loss of how to explain the shortcomings of this magical creature who just last night we were contemplating in all her fairy goodness. Does she come down the chimney? Does she walk through walls? I was predicting that she could turn glass into water and glide right through any window. I mean, she’s a fairy. And yet– EPIC FAIL.

As with any mishap created by someone else, the killing rage quickly passed, and I wanted to explain it away. (It’s so easy to forgive someone else, to allow that there might be good reasons for their shortcomings.)

“Oh no, Mica. Maybe it’s my fault. I was up late last night finding bandannas for your costume for the play. And I think it may have been around midnight that I was putting out the recycling. Maybe she saw me and got scared and turned away.”

My allergies have been killing me, all boogery eyes and nose and ears. What with the thick saliva strings on my mouthguard (you’d grind too if you had four kids in three years) and the liquid that had poured out of my nose, down my cheek and into my ear during the night, I think I felt almost as bad as Mica sounded. I certainly looked worse.

We continued to conjecture, “Maybe it’s because Matthew lost his tooth in my class yesterday, too,” suggested Mica. Reid thought that it could have had something to do with her lost tooth just a couple days before.

Twins
May 2015

“Oh, good one. Maybe she got confused by your twinness and she thought she’d already done your room?”

Which seemed unlikely, because she found both Mica and his older brother out of state with a $2 bill and a Sacajewea dollar on the same night in the same room just last summer.

Probably no one remembers that but me.

It’s weird, because right around the time the tooth fairy likely would have been coming to my house, I was texting a friend to ask her what the costumes for the play were supposed to be. She replied-

I just threw a bandana and a plain tshirt in the boys backpacks. Well… a Red Sox shirt flipped inside out. It’ll look plain from far away, right? Wow, we are totally nailing this!

Yesterday midday I had one of those five minute conversations that is worth an hour of normal people speak with another girlfriend of mine. She was enumerating her biggest parenting fails of the weekend. I was enumerating mine. There wasn’t enough time for all of them. Oh, yes, we’re totally nailing this motherhood stuff.

Maybe the tooth fairy is a mom, too, and she’s got stuff going on.

I stopped by the bank on the way to the doctor’s today to see if the tooth fairy had been in. I was wondering if she was planning anything special for my sweet peach of a boy. If she was planning anything at all. The women at the bank looked aghast and said they hadn’t seen her, but they hoped my son would get a good explanation for her tardiness.

Me, too, I thought.

I later mentioned all this to my doctor when she told me I had a bacterial infection possibly brought on by allergies. She congratulated me for actually coming in before it became walking pneumonia (Memorial Day weekend 2013) or Shingles (Easter 2014.)

So there’s that. She said she bet the fairy would come tonight and leave a wonderful note, better than if she’d made it over last night. She thought maybe the tooth fairy was sick. It’s going around, you know?

I bet the note she leaves will even have some of that glittery dandruff stuff on it.

Before Mica headed out of my room to get dressed this morning, I closed with a guarantee that would hold him for the day.

“If she doesn’t come tonight, I’ll get you something,” I promised.

He looked vaguely surprised.

“That’th okay, Mama,” he said patting me. “We should be more pathient with her. Let’s give her a few dayth.”

He and his sister nodded at each other, and let me snap a few pictures of their twin losses, a pair of lovely gap-toothed grins.

“Yeah. Maybe she jutht needth thome time.”

Alas.

My kids
May 2015