How the tooth fairy builds childhood magic - until she doesnt

My 9-year old daughter recently lost a tooth. That is to say it got lodged in some food she was eating as it was already very loose. Technically, she lost it a few months ago but since I haven't blogged here since July, I'll just lump it into the category of recent happenings. She claims it was a molar and frankly I just don't know enough about teeth to know the difference between them and a box of Chiclets. What's important at this point is not what I know about teeth but how I handle the whole tooth fairy portion of the program.

I don't remember when I stopped believing in this mystic creature, but I can't help but wonder if my daugther is getting a little too old for this time honored tradition. I consider fishing for her opinion on the topic without being ultra obvious about it, but far be it for me to ruin the last vestiges of childhood magic surrounding her. In other words, I'm not quite ready for her to make that leap into preadolescence.

Previous experience with the tooth fairy has resulted in quite an animated conversation between her dad and I in regard to the appropriate amount of "coin" to bestow for these enamel and dentin items formerly found in her mouth. I'm good with 50 cents. It's a tooth. It's not like I found it while panning for gold in California's rush for Pete's sake! Her dad prefers to offer up five dollars for something nobody is going to care about the next morning. Location alone can obviously affect the going fairy rate, but since I don't live in a neighborhood like the one where her dad lives, I've had to quickly come up with plausible reasons for the extreme drop in premium paid.

I've heard myself say, "well, there's a recession going on and the tooth fairy here in our town is in a union." Really? Is this how far we have to go to prolong growing up? You betcha!

I decided to ask my husband for his take on the whole situation. His response? "Tooth fairy? Yeah, right!"

Apparently, there was no such thing as a tooth fairy in his childhood. As a matter of fact, Santa Claus did not exist and don't even mention the Easter bunny around him. I then asked him what became of his teeth and how did he even manage childhood without the magic of it all? I mean, did he wonder about these characters when others talked about them at school?

He replied with, "I did put my tooth under my pillow one time after a friend at school talked about getting money from some fairy person."

To which I practically screamed, "And, what happened?"

He looked at me with a dull expression and said, "Nothing. I got nothing. Oh, but my tooth was still there."

Bewildered by this unheard of conclusion to laying a tooth under a pillow, I asked, "Did you tell your mom your tooth fell out?"

He said, "No. I didn't know I was supposed to."

This makes perfect sense of course because as a child, you don't know right off that your parents are the ones that make the money thing happen. "You're supposed to tell your mom," I said. "That's when she 'gets the message to the tooth fairy' and you end up with a coin or two the next morning."

He smiled at this and said, "My friend did explain it to me the next day after I grumbled about it. That night, I told my mom, put the tooth under my pillow and when I woke up, the tooth was still there." Apparently, his mom had forgotten about it by the time she went to sleep. It was the little tooth that wouldn't go away.

I felt a little sad for him and wondered if this negatively affected him at all.

"Of course not," he said and I believe him. I mean, who needs the tooth fairy for childhood magic when he grew up surrounded by Hawaiian music royalty? The melodies, the harmonies...I'm certain it was all the awe inspiring life moments he needed.

When I asked my brother how he was planning to handle the whole tooth fairy thing, he said, "Are you kidding me? My son is already in wonder of butterflies and flowers. You think I wanna introduce a fairy into that?" He will. After all, this is the guy we (my sisters and I) refer to as "Mr. Christmas" because he has always been so excited about the holidays and everything about them. Christmas lights. Snow covered village scenes. Trains making their way on a track around the tree. Waiting for the JcPenny Christmas catalog to arrive in the mail and then going through it and methodically marking it with circles of various sizes around the items he believed he could not live without. Pictures with Santa Claus. Barely sleeping on Christmas Eve and spending the magical day with us because we all got what we wanted...mostly.

At the end of this self-created saga, my daughter explained that she's known for quite some time that I was her tooth fairy (or at least acting on the fairy's behalf), but didn't want to let on because she still wanted to get money for her teeth. Is this manipulation or should I be relieved I didn't have to break down the magic fortress around her? I look at it both ways. Mostly, I console myself with the realization that she's growing up and there's not much I can do to stop it. On the bright side, I can now pepper her with morsels of guidance while sitting on the beach, sharing an ice cream cone. That might be all the magic she'll ever need.