It was a risky precedent when the Boy got €25 in loose change for his tooth
Reports from the United States suggest the American tooth fairies have lost the run of themselves altogether. Some children over there are going to bed down a tooth and waking up $100 richer. Others open their eyes to iPhones or designer jewellery.
On the basis that almost everything that starts over there eventually moves over here, there may be trouble ahead.
The tooth fairy allocated to this household only went stone mad once. That was on the awful day when the then three-year-old Boy jumped like Spiderman from the top step of the viewing area at the swimming pool to the one below, slipped and smacked his mouth onto the metal bar, sending his front tooth flying. More than 20 years later, I still feel a wave of nausea at the memory, along with some predictable Mom guilt over the fact that I was gossiping with a neighbour about John Major’s affair with Edwina Currie at the time and between that and waving at The Small Girl having her swimming lesson, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the diminutive stuntman beside me. Anyway, a deeply traumatic day eventually gave way to a restoratively winey night, during which the tooth fairy crept in and left about €25 in loose change under The Boy’s pillow. Given that it was his first tooth, it was a risky precedent to set — luckily for the Fairy Bank, The Boy had no real concept of the value of money then (or now, come to think of it. You could say it was a childhood trauma that has kept on giving.)
After that, our tooth fairy settled into more sober habits. Two euro was the going rate, with a modest bonus scheme for those messy molars or teeth that had been particularly problematic. One time, The Boy swallowed a tooth by accident and was up the walls about the potential financial consequences. I assured him that it would be OK, that the fairy would find a way to get the tooth eventually, and then I watched him gravely explain to his best friend how tooth fairies had tiny diving suits for extracting rogue teeth from poo in the sea.
The Youngest fared the worst from the tooth fairy because by the time her baby teeth started falling out, both parents and fairies were completely over the novelty of losing teeth. After counting 50-odd teeth out, the fairy became forgetful and it wasn’t unusual for the unfortunate child to find her tooth exactly where she’d left it the previous night. If she’d had the bad timing to lose a tooth on a Saturday, there was even less chance that the fairy would show.
Eventually, the tooth fairy wrote a tiny letter of apology to The Youngest, explaining that she had a busy schedule and sometimes she got delayed, and doubling the going rate for teeth collected late. Inevitably, The Youngest was so charmed by the tiny, exquisite handwriting that she replied to the letter with a series of general enquiries — clarification on the existence of the diving suit amongst them, obviously — leaving her demands under her pillow.
I can’t speak for the fairy in all of this, but I strongly suspect that she was just too busy doing tooth collections to embark on any further correspondence with her wouldbe pen pal.
We also had a ‘dodie’ fairy who visited this house to collect each small person’s final soother and reward them with a toy. The Youngest was a little older than the others when she finally quit, which allowed the ‘dodie’ fairy to compensate for the shoddy service of her colleagues in the tooth department. In return for a modest, chewed-up, past-its-best soother, The Youngest was gifted a huge and expensive My Little Pony rollercoaster (because what pony doesn’t need its own rollercoaster?)
At least our fairies, slipshod though some of them were, actually took the teeth and the ‘dodies’ away. In my friend Barbara’s house, they threw the children’s teeth out the parents’ bedroom window and into the garden below, meaning that Barbara can now never sell her house in case the teeth are mistaken for human remains and she spends the rest of her life in prison. The information we had in our house was that the fairies used children’s teeth to build fences, surely a more creative and practical application than just shagging them into the flowerbeds.
I don’t know what the American tooth fairies do with their teeth, but if they’re worth hundreds of dollars and iPhones, I presume they use them for more than fence building. Maybe the big, weird orange fairy is using them to build his wall. Only in America.