Tooth fairies: The tooth and nothing but

Mom, the tooth fairy didn’t come!” complained our daughter as she entered our room this morning. I went to her room and looked under her pillow and true enough, her tooth was still there, together with her letter to her tooth fairy. In her letter, my daughter apologized for asking so many questions but asked anyway up to how old fairies lived and how they knew that a baby tooth had fallen out. She added a postscript to remind her to look at the usual place and that she was not going to put her tooth in the pockets of the tooth doll her younger brother had just knitted.

Well, I guess my daughter’s tooth fairy got bogged down somewhere and her helper (ahem) fell asleep. It’s not the first time this has happened. I remember a couple of months back when the dentist had to pull out one of my molars. At the time, I also purchased a Super Lotto ticket since the jackpot had gone over (or was close to) the 100-million-peso mark. I put the tooth under my pillow, hoping to wake up the following morning a multi-millionaire. But she was nowhere to be seen, too. Perhaps Charlie Brown’s friend, Frieda, was right in suspecting that the American Dental Society (and their local counterparts) put caps on how much fairies are supposed to give for each tooth (and that adult teeth are pretty much worthless). Or maybe mine was a renegade tooth fairy named Madoff (or de los Angeles?) and had run off with my fortune. 

Of course, there isn’t just one tooth fairy for everyone. Each child has his/her own. My daughter’s tooth fairy is Riana while my son’s is named Portia. Both of them live in fairyland where, together with the other fairies, they turn all the baby teeth that they collect into stars and ivory towers, in celebration of our passage from infancy to childhood. As they fly to and from children’s beds, they sometimes bump into the fairy godmothers, Santa Claus, Saint Nicolas, the Easter Bunny, and many other beings like them. All of them have their special magical jobs, but they are all united in the tasks of teaching children how to be good and making them happy. And that, my fellow parents, is the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth.

Now, some of you jaded adults might roll your eyes and ask if I really do still believe in the tooth fairy. And that perhaps it would be better for my children if I already started preparing them for the harsh realities of life instead of indulging them in their childhood fantasies. Well, first of all, even if I do admit that I have not yet actually seen the tooth fairy, let me cite that oft-quoted investigative dictum that “an absence of evidence does not mean that evidence is absent.” Secondly and more importantly, I think that the more relevant question is not whether we believe or not, but rather, can we afford to stop believing? In a Philippine society that Ricky Carandang has likened to Bizzaro’s world — the twisted planet of one of Superman’s arch enemies where everything is the reverse of what they should be, where wrong is right, criminals go free, whistleblowers are persecuted, and it is the crooks who lecture about moral recovery — how else do we prevent ourselves from going insane? We adults like to teach our children about goodness and truth, honesty and integrity, kindness and compassion, and about justice and fairness. Yet when they turn around and observe how we act, everything apparently gets lost in translation. We do exactly the opposite of what we teach them. And incredibly, incredibly, we adults like to tell ourselves that we are only doing these things “for our children.” 

There is an old movie or TV episode, the title of which already escapes me, wherein the children all over the world went on strike against their parents. As only children can see things, they could not understand why certain obviously moral issues could not be simple questions of black or white, of right or wrong.   If I recall the story correctly, all the children of the world literally refused to talk to adults until the US and the (then) USSR agreed to dismantle all nuclear weapons. In one scene, the President of the US went to the boy-leader with a compromise solution that, to the adults’ minds, was already way beyond the most optimistic expectations. But the children refused to budge from their youthful idealism. They refused to see it in the adult terms of compromise and pragmatism. In the end, the children won.

So do I still believe in the tooth fairy? Absolutely! I have no choice. Because the day I stop believing will be the day I surrender all the sense of hope and wonder I still have left inside me. Tomorrow morning, I’m pretty sure that our daughter will come to our room with a twinkle in her eye and tell us that Riana finally came, what her tooth was worth, and about her fairy’s answers to her questions. And I will thank the heavens yet again that she still believes in miracles; and pray that deposits of innocence such as these will be enough to sustain her in her coming adult life.

“Let the children come to me and don’t stop them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.” (Mark 10: 14-15)

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