by Nisa Sharma – Published in Parent:Wise Austin magazine – December 2008 – copyright

“It took some doing, but I finally yanked that pesky toof out!”  My daughter plops a giant, bloody molar into my hands and throws herself down next to me on the couch. She grins from ear to ear, pink toilet paper shoved into the left side of her smile.

“Wow! Cool…” I feign enthusiasm for the thing now sitting lop-sided and bloody in my hand. Who would have thought when that wondrous first tooth came through – on Mother’s Day no less – that nine years and two kids later, teeth would finally bore me? Having a bloody bone bit plunked into my hand time and time again just because I am the Mom has gone from exciting to disgusting. Makes me wonder what they would do should a toe suddenly fall off…

“I guess you’ll have tooth-fairy money for the weekend, huh?”

The bloody grin becomes very serious, and my nine-year-old confesses: “Um, Mom, about that… see,  don’t think the tooth-fairy is, you know, real and stuff.” She winces as she says it, and so do I, but the difference is my experienced poker face reveals no guilt, no shock and no disappointment, though I’m feeling all of them in spades.

“Oh?” I ask, perhaps a little too curiously, which I think gives me away.

“Yeah…” she’s obviously hiding something.

“Why is that, Honey? Did someone at school say something? I could just strangle that one girl with the teenage older sister who’s always telling the kids what’s what.

“Yes, but also, I did a test.” A test? Well of course, she is, after all, my logician. “See, I lost a tooth last week and didn’t tell you. And the tooth-fairy never came, so now I don’t believe in her.”

I am caught in the cross hairs on a flat wasteland with nowhere to hide. “But… but… what about those times she DID come? Don’t those count?”

“Of course! It felt good to think about earning money for my lost teeth,” she responds in that maddeningly reasonable manner she inherited from her father. “But really, thinking about some sort of human-bug thingy flying around my room is kinda creepy. And so I figured out that it was you coming in and putting money under my pillow.”

Her face is completely dead-pan. She has always been older than her years. Once, she told me she sometimes felt like she was the mom and I was the daughter. Right now, I’d like to trade because while she’s handling this with such poise, I’m a blubbering gelatinous mass inside.

“Hmmmm, so that’s it then? You just don’t believe?” She nods her head. “Okay, but just so you know, I confess to nothing – oh, and if you don’t believe in the tooth-fairy, she stops believing in you, which means no more money.”

The wise one bites her bottom lip a bit. “Okay, I guess that makes sense,” she says.

At about this time, her father walks in, gauges my body language, and levels his gaze at our daughter.

“Oh yeah,” our daughter says in a casual way. “I was just telling Mom that I’m too old to believe in the tooth-fairy.”

“Uh… okay… well… um… I guess you have to grow-up sometime.” He looks at me, then at our daughter, then back at me. That’s when she springs her bombshell.

“And just so both of you know, I know all about Santa Clause too – and don’t worry, I won’t ruin it for my brother.”

I think that’s when I fainted. Or maybe it was just the air being kicked from my gut. In any case, I ended-up in a heap on the couch, conscious only enough to hear her father say:

“Are you happy now? You’ve just killed your Mother.”

Nisa Sharma doubles as the Art Director for Parent:Wise Austin. Read her blog: NisaTheMom.blogspot.com.