The Tooth Fairy and I've been cooking but I can't prove it

Also I have Covid.

It’s May in San Francisco. Spring has sprung - our backyard is fluffy with pink-and-white crab apple blossoms and yellow roses. Gargantubaby and I just finished the absolutely most interminable fourth Harry Potter book WHY SO MANY SUBPLOTS FOR FUCK’S SAKE, and I was so tickled to hear Dumbledore, in Chapter 36, say: “You place too much importance, and you always have done, on the so-called purity of blood! You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!”

This, from the trans hater J.K. Rowling, with no sense of irony.

Since the last time I wrote, I directed a whole-ass San Francisco street festival, with dozens of volunteers. My life was taken over by my kid’s PTA for a while there, but at the end of that long and magical day, when palomas and sangria and beer flowed, shrimp and tinga tostadas and empanadas were gobbled down, luchadores flew through the air and collapsed into rows of chairs (and SMOKED IN THE CAFETERIA and PEED INTO WATER BOTTLES FOR CHRIST’S SAKE WE HAVE BATHROOMS), dancers danced, drummers drummed, and kids played, I held my son’s face-painted face and dreamily, in the afterglow of $15,000 raised for our “high-priority” school, asked what his favorite part of the day had been.

“Playing video games with Amias afterwards,” he said.

Gargantubaby is seven. He’s missing four incisors, so he can stick a pencil into both sides of his mouth, which he does. He rolls out of bed in the morning in his Transformers pajamas, his grown-out, asymmetrical haircut ratted, sits down at his desk, and whips out five pencil drawings of Sprunkis — with shading and captions — before breakfast. He demands to play one-touch soccer and mini-basketball inside the house. He feels no terror or even hesitation about dressing up as Harvey Milk for “dress as your favorite queer icon day” at his school. He looks less like he’s drowning and more like he’s swimming when he’s in the pool. He appears to not be bullying or being bullied. He is like me at his age, hand forever in the air, resplendent with the correct-adjacent answer, and me at this age, a classic extrovert, every interaction a dopamine hit that leaves me feeling slightly manic. I am hoping this self-confidence and happiness mean my son will skip the in-between and slide straight from the wonderment of childhood to the contentment of well-earned middle age.

I have a lot of thoughts about having had a child at 40. Mostly, relief: that I didn’t have him any earlier, given the long trajectory of my healing, so he has inadvertently been spared the worst of me. That I spent my thirties doing so much traveling, that I got my sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll out of my system in my twenties, that I don’t look at other people’s travel photos and then bitterly at him. That after I waited until the last possible minute, my eggs were viable and healthy. That the guy I ended up with is so much more than I would have settled for.

Women my age are having a renaissance right now. I’m the right age to appreciate it, but their experience doesn’t match mine. I LOVE to read stories of women in their late forties and fifties getting spanked for the first time, dumping bad relationships, slutting around. I read them all, titillated and empowered. I want all of us to WIN. But right now I’m just trying to make sure I don’t discover anything new about myself that requires me to dip into my savings, pack a box, or blow my kid’s world apart.

Which leads me to the Tooth Fairy.

This is how I remember it: I was in the bedroom, lounging on the bed (unlikely). Gargantubaby had lost another tooth. He was scooting down the ladder butt-first, the way he does (long story - we built the upstairs on a shoestring and don’t have an actual stairway, just a ladder that pulls down from the ceiling). He had just been talking to his dad, who was upstairs working at his computer, probably video-editing. He was happy and conversational.

“Mommy,” he said confidently, “is the Tooth Fairy real, or are you the Tooth Fairy? You can tell me.”

His question was so specific. It wasn’t is the Tooth Fairy real or not — it was, are you the Tooth Fairy? I remember watching his chatty, cherub face make its way down the aluminum ladder and thinking, oh, God, is this happening now? I’m not ready for it. He knew it was me?

“Well,” I said, with some presence of mind to not just blurt anything out, “come sit with me.”

My son, still damp from his bath, sat on my lap.

“It’s me,” I said, smiling, a lilt to my voice.

My son’s face did something. He maintained eye contact as long as he could, brown eyes wide, moving nothing on his happy, trusting face while everything beneath it rippled. Then he wailed. The wailing was so complete I can’t describe a beginning. He wept longly, loudly, honestly. I held him and said, “Oh, honey,” with a sort of surprised shock, the way I’d done when he was a baby and came upon him distraught and powerless. We had surprised each other. His grief was deep. My shock was real. I had ruined everything. How much longer had we had with the Tooth Fairy that I just tossed away? Years? He had just shown me the drawing he’d made for the Tooth Fairy for when she would come to take his tooth that night. He had used the word “love”, the way he always did. He loved the Tooth Fairy. He drew three-dimensional letters for her. He commiserated in the early mornings with me about what she’d left for him, notes written in her odd, left-handed (I mean, I assume) scratch, her sweet messages about how proud she was of him and what a kind boy he was and how much she loved his tooth and how grateful she was he had left it for her.

He cried and cried and cried.

Until I said: “Just kidding!”

My son cried a little more. It was still coursing through him so he couldn’t stop right away. Please, I thought. Please don’t ask any questions. Please just let me get away with one lie.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Bad joke. I’m so sorry I made you cry.”

Both my husband and my stepdaughter think I’m a piece of shit. But GB has lost two more teeth since then, and a couple things have happened. First, the Tooth Fairy’s payments have gotten much better. She has moved on from seemingly random cash denominations to dates with Mommy. First, the Tooth Fairy demanded that Mommy take GB to La Copa Loca in the Mission to get some ice cream since she made him cry. Then, she made Mommy take GB on an adventure to find the perfect donut and they got four donuts from Jelly Donut on 24th Street. Then, GB happened to mention that he would love it if the Tooth Fairy would make Mommy take him to Holy Moley, the local indoor mini-golf place, and even though Mommy has hated mini-golf and all things representative and constructed since early in life, including poetry, plays, comic books, and video games (I KNOW), GB got the full 18 holes and then some tabletop games of Connect Four.

This was a renaissance in our lives, quite unexpected. I had started to believe, completely unbeknownst to myself, that my kid was a sort of adult in kid’s clothing. He was so smart. He used big words. He was silly but he knew he was being silly. He told me what he was feeling and articulated it so well I didn’t question that he was in control of himself. But when I saw how wounded he was by the loss of the Tooth Fairy, it set me straight on any misunderstanding I had about where he is in his life. I have been so much gentler with him, without ever thinking I wasn’t being gentle with him. I was always more patient with him than anyone else in my life. It gutted me that I had so misjudged him, not seen my kid, not understood him the way we’re supposed to know our kids, not only because we’re adults and possess all the knowledge, but because he’s My Kid, and I’m supposed to know him better than anyone.

(I made up the Tooth Fairy, killed her, and brought her back from the dead! You’re welcome! Therapy’s on me.)

*

I’m obsessed with my kid. Every year since he’s been born, I think this is the year I’ll start thinking he’s a little less cute, and every year it’s the opposite. He gets more interesting, cuter, smarter, funnier. I will never stop taking creepy pictures of him sleeping.

Strong Jaw: I felt myself slipping off the couch, and then I landed on that thing, and I was so happy.

Mouse guy is back, this time on the Poster Wall Museum across the street from GB’s school instead of on the wall of the daycare center, which is nice of him (I’m assuming it’s a him), and I have no idea who he is so please tell me.

The JD Vance stickers are made by Janet Manley of Kafka’s Baby and if you don’t follow her for cerebral parenting/literature/New York/Australian shit, you should. Also, my friend Jessica Slice is kicking serious ass with the launch of Unfit Parent: A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World including an excerpt in the GuardianUS which one of my co-workers picked up before I even saw it was in the queue!!!

This week I made:

• Sauteed eggplant with garlic

• A bagel

• A “salad” of half a can of garbanzo beans, leftover white rice, chopped cucumber, cilantro, halved grape tomatoes, cumin, turmeric, olive oil, and salt

• Leftover polenta that SJ made with olive oil and salt so it worked with my vegan-ish-ism, heated up with half a can of kidney beans, TWICE, so I ended up eating the whole can of kidney beans and all the left-over polenta

If a copy editor with Covid coughs in the woods, does anyone hear her?