The Tooth
She lost a tooth at my house.
I want to tell you what that meant, and to do that I have to tell you something about time.
When you don't have all the days, you notice which ones you get. You notice that some things — the first steps, the first words, the first ride without training wheels — happen on a schedule nobody controls, and they happen wherever the child happens to be. You can't schedule a loose tooth. It comes out when it comes out.
This one came out here.
She was so excited. That specific, uncontainable kind of excitement kids have where they can't hold still and they tell you the same fact four times in a row. There's a hole. Feel it with your tongue. Look. Look.
And then she took it home.
That's the part I keep thinking about. She put it somewhere safe and took it to her mom's house and did the whole tooth fairy thing there — the pillow, the morning, all of it. All of it happened somewhere I wasn't.
I could have made that a loss. It would have been easy. The tooth came out on my time and the magic happened somewhere else, and there's a way of counting that makes that unfair.
But that's counting for me. And this isn't for me.
What she got was the whole thing. The tooth came out at Dad's, which was exciting, and the tooth fairy came at Mom's, which was magic, and in her memory those aren't two competing halves. They're one continuous childhood. She doesn't experience her life as split between two houses. She experiences it as her life.
The seam is only visible to the adults.
My job was to keep it invisible. To be excited with her, to help her keep the tooth safe, to send it home with her without a single word that would make her feel like she'd taken something from me.
Because she hadn't. That's the truth, not just the thing I decided to say. She'd carried something across, which is what kids do — it's the whole thing they're doing all the time when they move between two places.
With limited time, you don't get every moment. You get to make sure the ones you have aren't complicated by you.
That's the discipline. Don't complicate it. Let the tooth be a tooth. Let the excitement be excitement. Let her carry it home.
She'll never remember which house the tooth came out in. She'll remember that losing a tooth was one of the best days of her life.
Both are true. Only one of them matters.