Dear Tooth Fairy: You’re Fired!

It was early morning, and I was awakened by the sound of my son sniffling.

“Dad,” he said, hiccupping between sobs, “the tooth fairy didn’t come!”

Luckily, I was turned away from my disappointed son, so he didn’t see me clench my fists and mouth the words dammit dammit dammit.

I completely forgot. And it wouldn’t be so bad, except that I always completely forget. This is our third child who has lost teeth, and I—excuse me, the tooth fairy, has made each and every one of them cry.

“Awww, buddy, don’t worry,” says my husband. “Why don’t you go down and watch some cartoons for a little while?”

Leave it to my husband. In these situations, he is calm and knows how to deflect attention to, in this case, SpongeBob. He and I just steal glances at each other and just shake our heads. We are hopeless, and we know it.

Twenty years from now, we’ll be having a big family dinner together, and our four adult children will go around the dinner table and recollect the many many wrongs done to them by us, their parents. It’s a day I will try to prepare for, because I know it’s coming.

“They could never get it right. Once, they told me the tooth fairy didn’t come because she was on vacation.”

“They told you that? Mom told me that my friend got more money from the tooth fairy because he lived on the north side of town, and the south side fairy paid less!”

“Remember that one time when she told us the tooth fairy probably got laid off because of the economy?”

I hope that some day, they can laugh about it, and forgive their Distracted Mommy. But I know in their heads, they’ll be promising to themselves that they’ll never make the same mistakes I did.

Under cover of the SpongeBob theme song being played in the next room, my husband sneaks into my son’s room and shuffles around.

“Well, no wonder!” he says loudly, so my son can hear. “The tooth fairy DID come! You just didn’t see it because she left the money for you on the dresser, not under your pillow where you were looking!”

My son runs up the stairs, and his eyes sparkle brightly at the sight of the crisp dollar bill on his dresser. His faith in all things mythical has been restored.

And I let out a huge sigh of relief. We have the most distracted, forgetful and inconsistent tooth fairy in the neighborhood. Maybe her wings are broken. She certainly didn’t graduate summa cum laude from Tooth Fairy University—she probably didn’t graduate at all.

If it weren’t for her calm and trustworthy assistant, she would’ve been fired long ago.