I have to admit that since our son was born 6 years ago I
have not slept in the same bed as my husband very much. Russ wants his mommy to lay down with him as
he goes to sleep and once I am horizontal I tend to stay put for the
night. Sometimes I wake up in the early
morning hours and sneak into the room Mike and I shared so exclusively
pre-parenthood. Mike and I manage to
steal a few moments to cuddle before we hear the inevitable “Mommy, I need you
“ and a tousled and crabby Russ stumbles into the room. Then, in an unsubtle
bit of body language, he wedges himself in between Mike and I, turns his back
to Dada, puts his arms around my neck and declares, proprietarily, “My
Mommy”. I have come to think of him as
our little Oedipest.
This morning, I had crawled in with Mike and was almost
asleep when I jerked back to wakefulness.
I had forgotten something very important. “Ack! The tooth fairy!”
“Ack!” Mike echoed and jumped out of bed. He scrounged up
the cash, managed to slip it under the pillow of still sleeping Russ and get
back in bed just moments before, “Mommy, I need you,” and the bleary appearance
of the Oedipest.
“Wait, wait!” we stopped him as he prepared to wedge into
bed, “did you check if the tooth fairy came?”
Russ, suddenly wide awake and forgetting to defend his mommy
from the interloper, dashed back into his room.
When he re-appeared he was clutching a dollar and wearing a big grin
that showed both rows of perfect, even, pearly, baby teeth, all except the
bottom right incisor, his first missing tooth.
“Cool Russ, the tooth fairy came! How much did you get?”
“Come on,” Russ jeered, ”It was mommy who put it there.” I
was able to profess my innocence in complete honesty. “Besides,” he continued,
“It wasn’t the tooth fairy because she didn’t even take the tooth. See, its
still here in this box.”
“Look,” I explained, “the tooth fairy has been collecting
teeth from every kid in the world at least since Dada and I were your age and
that’s a long time ago. Her warehouse is
full. She can’t inventory any more teeth
, so, these days, she just leaves the money.”
“Wait a minute,” Dada interjected, “How do we know the tooth
fairy is a girl? Aren’t you being sexist? What if the Tooth Fairy is a ‘he’?” I
was instantly overwhelmed with an enchanting vision: the Tooth Fairy a Le Cage
Aux Folles, resplendent in stiletto heels, big hair and feather boa. If only it could be so.
Russ, whose cultural literacy does not extend to drag
queens, had gone in a different direction. “If it was a boy that would make him
the ‘Tooth Elf’” He observed.
“That’s it!” agreed Dada “It was the Tooth Elf!”
“The Tooth Elf”, I continued,” who comes at night in his
slug-drawn carriage.”
“He comes at night,” grunted Dada, becoming the hunched and
hideous Tooth Elf, “slobber dripping from his jaws. He reaches out his gnarled hand clutching a
slimy dollar and…”
“You guys are being silly!” Russ protested, “It was mommy, I
know it was mommy who left it.”
And so the Tooth Elf visited our house for the first time. He’ll be out another 23 bucks over the next
few years of Russ’ awkward, gap toothed metamorphosis. I suppose I’ll get used to this new phase,
but it has been hard to see that first tooth go.
We had been watching it wiggle for about a week, Russ, impatient
for promotion into the ranks of his toothless peers, me savoring the last
precious hours of his perfect baby toothed smile. Yesterday he worked it free. He was ecstatic,
running around the house, gums bleeding, clutching his tooth, trying to get a
good look in the mirror, calling his grandparents on the phone. I put the tooth in a little manzanita burl
box and just stared at it, remembering the day I first saw it, a tiny hard
white ridge, working up through my baby’s pristine gums. It was as exciting and unwelcome then, on
its way in, as it is now, on its way out.
When Russ was tiny, one of my more mystical friends told me
that when a baby is born its soul and its mother’s soul are one. As the child
grows his soul slowly separates from his mother’s, like cell mitosis, each half
pulling apart, until, on the day when the first tooth is lost, they part and
each soul stands alone. The first lost
tooth, then, is the physical evidence of this metaphorical day of separation, a
symbol of the bittersweet magic of watching one’s child grow up.
The relationship of mother and child, like a cell dividing,
is a dance of holding on and letting go.
It is the only relationship that, when healthy, decreases in intimacy
over time, from the womb, to the breast, to the schoolyard, to the day they
leave home. Sometimes it seems they
launch, heedless and impatient, toward adulthood while Mom keeps holding out
and holding on just a little longer and tighter than they ever want. Other times it seems they resist and procrastinate,
or even regress, in the face of that inevitable next step that we are so
anxious for them to take.
Sometimes I long for a full quiet night alone with my
husband. A night in which there is no chance that anyone has taken any legos to
bed for me to roll over on. A night in
which there is no possibility that anyone will pee in, or throw up in, or fall
out of the bed. A night in which I will
occupy a generous half of a queen size bed and not a 10-inch wide strip up next
to the wall. A night in which no one
will end up lying perpendicular to me with their feet in my kidneys. But other times, most times, the nights seem
so few and precious in which I will drift off to sleep with this small warm
body in my arms, smelling the fragrance of his sweet sweaty curls, our souls
overlapping. We push, push, push them
out of diapers, into day care, out of our beds, into school while they pull
away, impatient for their freedom. Yet
at the same time they cling in innocent devotion and wedge into bed while we
hoard curly locks of baby hair, photos, crayon scribbles and, now, tiny teeth
in a small wooden box.
Russ is unable to comprehend why I am fixating wistful and
teary eyed on his now ex-tooth. When I
tell him that it is hard for Mommy to see her baby grow up, he comments “Mom, I’m the same exact size I was
yesterday…I’m just missing a tooth. Now move over Dada.”
So Dada moves over. There is enough room and measure of time
for a bright morning, one bed, two parents, one tooth, one dollar bill, and one
kid with a gap tooth grin.
