{"id":140916,"date":"2019-11-14T09:00:22","date_gmt":"2019-11-14T14:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=140916"},"modified":"2019-11-14T09:33:02","modified_gmt":"2019-11-14T14:33:02","slug":"i-am-the-tooth-fairy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/11\/14\/i-am-the-tooth-fairy\/","title":{"rendered":"I Am the Tooth Fairy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sabrina Orah Mark\u2019s monthly column,\u00a0Happily<\/a>, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI know you\u2019re the tooth fairy.\u201d Noah, my eight-year-old, looks me dead in the eye. We are out to dinner. A large television hangs from the wall. Without blinking, he looks back up at the screen. A small, dry wing falls from my back and lands on the floor like a candy wrapper. The thing about not existing is that sometimes it\u2019s a lot like being a mother.<\/p>\n

\u201cSorry, Mama,\u201d says Eli, my six-year-old. He pats my hand and takes a bite of broccoli.<\/p>\n

I think about all the elaborate notes in pink cursive, the one hundred shiny pennies in a cloth pouch, the blue stuffed cat, the five-dollar bill, the Superman, the glitter trails, the wooden hearts, the breath I held, the way I ever so gently lifted the pillow, the sparkle-stamped envelope with the tooth fairy\u2019s address: 12345 Tooth Fairy Lane, Moutharctica, Earth<\/em>. I kept myself secret. I tiptoed. I used my imagination, and now I\u2019ve been caught. Noah looks at me again with a mix of sadness and pity and suspicion. I turn around to see what he\u2019s watching.\u00a0 It\u2019s a cartoon about a sea sponge who lives with his meowing pet snail.<\/p>\n

A little light goes out inside me. But I can\u2019t locate exactly what it ever lit up.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

After Tinker Bell drinks the poison Hook left for Peter Pan, and her wings can barely carry her, and her light starts fading, and after she lets Peter Pan\u2019s tears run over her finger, she realizes \u201cshe can get well again if children believed in fairies.\u201d \u201cClap your hands; don\u2019t let Tink die,\u201d says Peter Pan. Many children clapped, some didn\u2019t, \u201ca few little beasts hissed.\u201d Tink, of course, is saved. She flashes \u201cmore merry and impudent than ever.\u201d It doesn\u2019t even occur to her to thank the children who believed. Tink, whose name sounds like a penny tossed in a glass. Tink, whose name sounds like a wish that won\u2019t come true.<\/p>\n

Often as a mother I am in a cold sweat juggling whimsy and delight. \u201cMagic anyone? Endless fun? Astounding joy?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d say my sons, \u201cwe\u2019re good.\u201d And they are. It\u2019s me who isn\u2019t good. It\u2019s me who wants it. And I don\u2019t even want it.<\/p>\n

What I want is my sons\u2019 illegible, lyrical teeth. I want to turn them into an alphabet just for us. Letters with crowns and necks and roots. Milk letters.\u00a0 Deciduous letters. In this language I would draw a map that clearly marks where my sons\u2019 wonder is buried so they always know where to go on their coldest days.<\/p>\n

Clap your hands; don\u2019t let mother die. My sons clap their hands and I brighten.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never seen a fairy. I\u2019ve never looked up and seen a faint green glow. The closest I\u2019ve ever come was once as a child\u2014in a dream\u2014I ran after myself, and when I caught up to me and turned around I wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

We take shelter in children to escape oblivion. We ask the child to drag around the unwieldy weight of magic. To clap wildly. To believe in what we believe in no longer. We ask the child to keep the awe we forgot how to hold. The fairy isn\u2019t the fairy. It\u2019s the child who is the fairy. It\u2019s the child who is enchanted, a metaphor, a shape-shifter. My sons keep bursting out of their skin. They smell like poppies, warm earth, milk. And then one day, out of nowhere, they won\u2019t anymore. They are losing their baby teeth at what seems an alarming rate. Adult teeth bloom in their mouths. Their limbs grow longer and longer like shadows.<\/p>\n

For whom is a child\u2019s childhood? I think it\u2019s for all of us. But it\u2019s not for when we are children. Our childhoods are for later.<\/p>\n

Some believe fairies are the discarded gods of the oldest faiths. Like shed skins of light. They continue to exist because they believe, like a child, that they exist.<\/p>\n

The fairy isn\u2019t the fairy. The mother is the fairy. The fairy flits back and forth, uncatchable. Who is she? The fairy is the space between knowing and not knowing. It\u2019s the realization as it dawns. It\u2019s what glows between a mother and her child. It\u2019s Puck sweeping the dust with a broom behind the door. The fairy is the dust. The fairy is the door.<\/p>\n

In 1691, Robert Kirk, a minister in the Church of Scotland, wrote a treatise claiming fairies were as real as you or me. It wasn\u2019t published, though, until 1851, when \u201cThe Secret Commonwealth\u201d was printed in a limited edition of a hundred copies. We each, he wrote, have a fairy counterpart, a co-walker, an echo. He described fairies as \u201csomewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud and best seen in twilight.\u201d Their bodies are spongeous and thin. \u201cThe are sometimes heard to bake bread.\u201d \u201cThey speak but little and that by way of whistling\u2014clear, not rough.\u201d \u201cThey hang between the nature of God, and the nature of man.\u201d Their body is \u201cas a sigh is.\u201d<\/p>\n

They do not curse, but among their common faults are \u201cEnvy, Spite, Hypocrisy, lying, and dissimulatione.\u201d They are prone to sadness because of their pendulous state. They can cure a sick cow. They steal milk, and when they are very angry they spoil it.<\/p>\n

On May 14, 1692, Reverend Kirk took a walk in his nightgown on the fairy hill beside the manse. Later that evening, on the same hill, his body was found dead. The body that was buried, according to locals, was a changeling. The fairies had kidnapped the minister in his nightgown, replaced him with a dead fairy, and held the reverend captive in Fairyland.<\/p>\n

The punishment, it seems, for believing too much in fairies is to be snatched away by them for eternity.<\/p>\n

Three days after I give birth to Noah, I am nursing him in a soft, beige rocking chair when a goat walks in. \u201cHello,\u201d I say. The goat, being a goat, says nothing.\u00a0 Most likely, I am hallucinating from no sleep. Most likely, a little piece of this world has torn and through the rip a goat has walked in. The goat lays his soft head on Noah\u2019s head, like a kiss. The room fills up with wildflowers and then empties of wildflowers and then the goat is gone. Who am I to say there is no thin veil between this world and fairyland? I know this now, but I didn\u2019t know it then: I am the tooth fairy.<\/p>\n

This is how you can tell if your baby has been replaced by a changeling: boil water in an eggshell. If your baby is a changeling it will laugh and reveal it\u2019s as old as the forest. In all its years, it will say when it suddenly begins to speak, it has never seen anyone boil water in an eggshell. If you wish to keep the fairies away, put the Bible, a piece of bread, or iron in your child\u2019s bed. And if you wish to see a fairy, take the rope that once bound a corpse to a bier and tie it around your waist. Bend over and look between your legs. A procession of fairies will appear. If the wind changes directions while you do this, it is possible you will drop down dead.<\/p>\n

There are two kinds of fairies. There are the \u201ctrooping\u201d fairies, who live together on a hill. And then there are the ones who attach themselves to individuals, like a haunt. If I were a fairy, I\u2019m certain I\u2019d be the second kind, but to tell you the truth I\u2019d make a terrible fairy. A terrible mother fairy who writes about fairies, and by doing so angers them all.<\/p>\n

We are at the pediatric dentist because Eli has flown off his scooter and landed on his face. The dentist, who looks more like a very old child dressed up as a dentist than an actual dentist, puts Eli in a chair and raises it with a crank to the ceiling. She climbs up a ladder, and examines him in the air. \u201cYou okay?\u201d I call out from down here. From all the way down here. She tells me his two front teeth will have to be pulled. \u201cBad news,\u201d she says, smiling. She lowers Eli and climbs back down. She hands me a brochure on sedation options. She is wearing tiny pink sneakers. I imagine a back room filled with sparkling white teeth.\u00a0 Nightly she grinds them. And stirs the powder into her warm milk. Unlike the rest of us, she will live forever.<\/p>\n

\u201cCan we err on the side of nature?\u201d I ask. \u201cI don\u2019t recommend that,\u201d says the dentist who clearly was once a fairy.<\/p>\n

She shows me two fake front baby teeth attached to a wire. After she pulls Eli\u2019s teeth she can \u201ccement the device into his mouth,\u201d she says. \u201cI made one for my daughter,\u201d she says, her red cheeks glowing.<\/p>\n

The dentist\u2019s office is decorated like an amusement park: vending machines filled with toys, televisions frantic with cartoons, posters of wide-eyed animals in pants. The instruments on the dentist\u2019s tray\u2014forceps, mouth mirror, periodontal probe\u2014shine as the only reminder of where we are. There is even a giant stuffed panda. All you need to do is leave your name and number on a small piece of paper for the chance to win. I am so distraught I almost enter.\u00a0 Would she deliver the panda herself? Would she knock on our door with the prize and then devour us?<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s got out of here,\u201d I say to Eli. \u201cLet\u2019s run, Mama,\u201d says Eli. And we run.\u00a0 We run home where it\u2019s safe. Eli\u2019s baby teeth stay in for another year. And when they fall out naturally I add them to the rest. Between Noah and Eli I have twelve. Twelve teeth. Sometimes I just hold them. Noah\u2019s in one hand. Eli\u2019s in the other. Proof of their babyhood. Proof of the mouths they left behind. Those baby mouths that spoke words thickly accented by the land they came from. Maybe it\u2019s those teeth that are the fairies. The ones the children, in order to grow, must cast off. The teeth that made little holes in the air with new breath.<\/p>\n

If I were really the tooth fairy, I\u2019d lay each tooth, like a body, on a rose leaf. I\u2019d carry them one by one over my head through the streets. The air would brighten, and grow sad and sweet. And I would sing, though I cannot sing, a lament for everything I must remember and everything my sons must forget.<\/p>\n

Last night I slept with all my sons\u2019 teeth underneath my pillow. And when I woke up Noah and Eli were leaving me notes. They each had a long white beard, and they were very old and wise and radiant. I had caught them. And then I woke up again.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Happily here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections\u00a0<\/em>The Babies\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Tsim Tsum.\u00a0<\/em>Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, is recently out from Dorothy, a publishing project. She lives, writes, and teaches in Athens, Georgia.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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