I heard the crying first thing in the morning. L was nearly panicked, her crying almost a heaving, desperate bawling.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?”

“The tooth fairy! She didn’t come!”

Uh oh.

The tooth came out unexpectedly last night. She came running to me, showing the new gap in her lower teeth, explaining that she’d just bitten into an apple and boom — out it came. The first disaster of the experience occurred shortly after that, for we couldn’t find the little circular plastic container that the dentist had given her for her lost teeth. We searched and searched, but no one could remember where we’d put it after the last lost tooth.

I suggested that she put it on a bookshelf. “The tooth fairy will be able to hone in on it then,” I explained, thinking, “and that might make it a little easier for me to remember.”

Making the “100th Day of School” shirt

In the end, she put it in a plastic bag, which she tucked under her pillow.

“Well,” I said this morning, “perhaps the plastic bag somehow messed things up.” I could almost sense the gears turning, could almost hear the response: “But Daddy, that can’t be it. The last time, I put it in the little box the dentist gave me, and that was plastic!” So I made a preemptive explanation: “That’s odd, because the fairy box the dentist gave you is plastic. Perhaps it’s the type of plastic, or the fact that it’s in a bag.”

What a good thing that I didn’t almost blow it with the tooth fairy like I almost did with Santa, when I called down to K, “When did we buy that telescope?”

“Wait, did you buy it or did Santa?” L had asked.

Making the “100th Day of School” shirt

So it could have been much worse. A forgotten tooth fairy night can be remedied with the explanation that even the tooth fairy needs a night off and a couple of bucks under her pillow the next night. But there’s the question of whether one wants to do this: isn’t it essentially lying to your child? I always thought that as a teen and young adult, when the thought of being a parent first flitted into by brain. Now, with a bit more experience, I see it differently: it’s no more lying than telling a story is lying. We don’t take the time to examine the veracity of each story we read to the Girl. We don’t cultivate a sense of doubt in her simply for the sake of creating a skeptical daughter. We do it because a sense of the mysterious is not such a bad thing.

Yet as I left her room this evening, I realized that she could have peeked through one eye to see me sneaking out and I’d never know it. Maybe she’ll let us believe we’re still fooling her.

“Do your parents still believe you believe in the tooth fairy and all that?” a friend might ask.

“Yeah, it makes them feel good,” she might respond. “It lets them think I’m still a little girl.”

In a way, as long as she believes in the tooth fairy, as long as a missed visit causes tears, she is. But on the other hand, she put it behind her easily enough and soon was making her “100th Day of School” shirt, gluing anything and everything she could think of to her t-shirt. Had such a disaster occurred just a few months ago, I can’t see her getting over it so quickly. Just more proof that L’s imagined conversation contains the unavoidable truth: she won’t be a little girl forever, nor would we want her to be.