My O and His Existential Crisis
Posted on March 3, 2008
Filed Under dental disasters, kids, milestones, parenting | 11 Comments
Last week was a banner week. The term banner means “unusually good”. But it can also mean just outstanding. To me outstanding can be good or bad, as long as it’s not ordinary. Last week was outstanding in that it was an advent, the beginning of the second half of my O’s childhood, where he sheds the last bit of sweet, naivete to reveal the pragmatic, suspicious boy who has uttered the phrase, “the tooth fairy is dead,” thus changing his life and mine forever.
His Friedrich Nietzche moment was ushered in by Judy Blume. Blume, though a children’s writer, is no stranger to controversial topics. She is most famous for her book Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? in which the main character struggles to reconcile her faith. Having one Christian parent and one Jewish parent, Margaret is altogether doubtful. And I can remember her religious quest only because I just hopped over to Wikipedia. My lasting impressions from reading the novel way back in 1983 have nothing to do with God and the inherent dilemma of Jesus in a split family and everything to do with a budding interest in boys, the need for bras and the impending onset of menstruation. I can remember thinking, “Finally, this book has answers.” I was overcome with relief that there were now some topics I could safely avoid discussing with my mother.
Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret?, could be considered my first risque read, and in short order I was on to Clan of the Cave Bear and Danielle Steele’s Palomino. My pre-teen curiosity having been whetted, I was ravenous for information about sex, finding the answers one racy book at a time.
So it’s only fitting that a Blume book would be the tome in which my O finds the fodder for questioning his parent’s credibility. In the book, SuperFudge, Fudge and his brother Peter discover a box of teeth beneath their mother’s bed, the obvious proof that she is the stand in for the tooth fairy. Sagely, almost matter of fact, O placed the open book face down on his bed and came to find the answers, all too ready and willing to embrace the absence of the divine. Because I am his mother and hate to lie to my own, I did nothing to contradict his existential doubt. I nodded my head at all the right parts, careful not to lead him, cautiously allowing him to pick apart the notion of an itty bitty creature who flits from house to house collecting bicuspids and tucking dollar bills beneath pillows.
He was blushing with the secret of it, the unique and thrilling feeling of having caught the whole world in a lie. He repeated over and over, “I can’t believe I just asked about the tooth fairy. I can’t believe it’s not real.” I felt conflicted – on the one hand glad to be rid of an entirely uncomfortable and ridiculous lie and, on the other, slightly ashamed for having thrown in the towel, his reaction so obviously a sign that I could have convinced him with just a few choice words and a bit of imagination.
Now I wonder if it is possible for O to retain anything of the divine without the existence of the toothfairy? I think not. I think the death of the tooth fairy is the precursor to the death of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and every other contrived romantic notion we’ve ever presented as fact. He is sure there are no fairies in the world and so leprechauns and elves and unicorns and flying reindeer must all suffer the same fate.
And if he’s anything like his mother, now that he’s read SuperFudge and discovered the lie that is the toothfairy, it’s only a matter of time before he’ll be creating pornographic MadLibs with his friends behind closed doors. Today he is still a little boy. I know this because his current MadLibs read:
Every year, Eleanor Bean wins the “crazy” spelling bee. She’s a really “mean” girl who looks like a “mosquito”.
Now that we’ve killed off the tooth fairy and he’s discovered the power of the written word to define a world beyond the tame and the expected, it’s only a matter of time before he’s a regular subscriber to Penthouse magazine and his MadLibs read a little bit like this:
Every year, Eleanor Bean wins the “slutty” school spelling bee. She’s a really “breasty” girl who looks like a “vagina”.
I suppose I should go ahead and embrace the changes ahead. But it makes me weepy, the idea that I will miss tiptoeing into his room at night, pausing as he rolls over and mumbles something incoherent in his sleep, waiting patiently for the right moment to snatch the astonishingly tiny tooth from beneath his dozing head, replacing it with a few dollars, nothing to me but a fortune to a child.
I will turn to the written word for solace,
“There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, which demanded that on must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.” ~Norman Mailer
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