And now that school is back in session and I managed to not kill myself or my children or any of the small furry animals that reside here, it is time for me to fully panic about the damn Cake Walk which I volunteered to organize and run, again, for the third time. I’m not complaining (yet). I’m sure the PTO president in her infinite wisdom saw no issue with scheduling the school’s 50th Anniversary Party and Fundraising Bash for the week following Spring Break because apparently she’s never been away on vacation and can’t imagine why all the usual volunteers and involved mothers – just back from Florida – would be more consumed by the need to pick up the dog from the kennel and complete fifteen loads of beach towel laundry and catch up on 72 hours of e-mails than bake, frost and decorate a cake in the likeness of a pair of sandals or a dragon or a Barbie castle to donate to this year’s Cake Walk. So far I have ten responses to my Cake Walk flier. Last year we had 70 cakes donated and still ran out of cakey prizes a full half-hour before the close of the event.

Perhaps I should have chosen a color other than acid yellow for my flier paper. But Staples was having a sale. I thought the vibrant, ghastly hue of stomach bile would at the very least garner some attention and would save me four whole dollars over the calmer melon sherbet option. “A penny wise, a pound foolish,” as Ben Franklin might say when faced with making copy paper decisions for the local elementary school fundraiser.

So we’ll have ten cakes and three hours of event time which means we can allow approximately three winners per hour. That’s a winner every twenty minutes which amounts to a lot of walking around in circles to the up-tempo strains of Billboard Top Forty while waiting for me to draw the winning number from a hat. I have searched the MP3 archives for a worthy play list and was feeling good about my selections: Sexy Back by Justin, Touch My Body by Mariah, I Wanna Have Your Babies by Natasha Bedingfield and, of course, Beautiful by Snoop Dogg that is until MBH pointed out that I wasn’t MC-ing White Party on South Beach but rather a grade school version of musical chairs with cake. He thought some of the lyrics a bit inappropriate for the intended audience, taking special issue with the following chorus from Beautiful:

When I see my baby boo, shit, I get foolish
Smack a nigga that tries to pursue it (Oh-hooo!)
Homeboy, she taken, just move it
I asked you nicely, don’t make the Dogg lose it
We just blow ‘dro and keep the flow movin’
In a ‘64, me and baby boo cruisin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Body rag interior blue, and
Have them hydralics squeakin’ when we screwin’
Now she’s yellin’, hollerin’ out Snoop, and
Hootin’, hollerin’; hollerin’, hootin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Black and beautiful, you the one I’m choosin’
Hair long and black and curly like you’re Cuban
Keep groovin’, that’s what we doin’
And we gon’ be together until your moms move in… (Oh-hooo!)

I stand by my original selections and continue to insist that we can’t coddle our children forever. But in order to be accommodating and pleasantly suburban I have agreed to tame it up, and add some filler tunes like Queen’s We Will Rock You and Bust a Move.

That should make it acceptably white cake (with low fat cream cheese icing) for all those grade-school-parent-haters, don’t ya think?

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

There’s no mild segue back to obligation and necessity in my life, it’s just one giant muddle of minor mishaps that bundle up and make me want to keen and rant and flee to dark corners. I suppose it began before we even left, when I retrieved the luggage from the attic only to find that one of the fucking cats has been using the L.L. Bean Duffle bag as a litter box. (Have I mentioned how much I hate my cats?) Both felines were sternly reprimanded. The cat box was thoroughly cleansed and fresh litter applied just in case the cat in question was objecting to the general condition of the facilities. But then I remembered that the little one, the black and tan whiskery runt, once shat on my daughter’s sleeping bag that we kept beneath our bed to accommodate childish night wanderings and the need to sleep close to parental looking people in order to fool the Boogie man. Before our flight, a new piece of luggage was purchased at Marshall’s to the tune of a $100. (We gave up on the sleeping bag idea a long time ago.)

And then there’s the dog that, while kenneled during our vacation, was diagnosed with Lyme disease and administered antibiotics that must be continued for at least a month, twice a day, at $55 a bottle. When I inquired about the efficacy of the Lyme disease vaccination I seem to remember paying $64 for back in September, I was told that no vaccination is one hundred percent effective. “Oh I see, I see,” said the dumb blond, realizing she’d been fleeced by the over-entrepreneurial veterinarian.

With the all pets accounted for and expensive, it’s on to the children who both have dental appointments next week. Dental appointments? Wasn’t it just weeks ago that I was writing posts about extractions and nitrous oxide? Upon checking the dates, I have confirmed that it has been six months since the last frightfully expensive trip to the dentist. Time to steal ourselves for the next installment in the ongoing saga to save my son’s teeth.

This appointment is ill timed to coincide with some other major expenditures: the kids’ piano tuition is due today – we pay for lessons up front, their ten week tennis clinic must be paid for on Friday (after all, tennis is a life-sport), if O wants to play Spring baseball he must register and pay by week’s end though practices don’t start until April, my niece has a birthday tomorrow, my sister-in-law turns forty next Monday and my step-mother-in-law will be the big five-0 in six days, (both adults expect significant gifts, the child will be happy with a book). Oh, and the car won’t start and apparently needs a new battery, the plow company has just sent the bill for clearing our significant seasonal snowfall and the country club that we already can’t afford has sent notice that the membership dues have been “reassessed”, which is their refined way of saying bend over while we stick this bill up your arse along with your mortgage company and your insurance company and every other organization that has raised its rates in the first quarter of this new year.

And, and, and… I could go on, but let me just share the kicker.

This weekend, while playing Madden Football on the Wii (have I mentioned just how much I loathe the Wii?), O stepped backwards on one foot while shaking his numchuck furiously and cursing at the screen (which is apparently how all Wii games are played, sort of tipsy and wild, half blind with frustration), just as the dog was slipping along behind him. Ass over tea kettle he went and came crashing down on the coffee table, snapping it in two. Legs splintered (the table’s not his), the whole mahogany, antique thing of it unsalvageable.

I didn’t adore the table but it was old and finer than anything we could have bought on our own as it was inherited from my father-in-law who upgraded to a cushy, sueded, ottoman-type of coffee table sometime back. I’ve done the research and a replacement table of the same period and provenance as the one now dismembered in my basement will cost between $500 and $1500. For now we will make due with the table we bought at a yard sale back in ‘92. It has been in storage for just such an occasion, (the complete destruction of all things finer) and anxiously awaiting a relaunch. It is tired and worn and completely too modern for our entirely antique home, in other words, it’s a design disaster. But it’s seen some action. It was the sole table in our collegiate flop pad and having served the needs of five delinquent academics, I think it can handle anything the Wii, my children and my three pets have to offer. Just don’t expect an invitation for coffee anytime soon.

I feel for O, I really do. There’s nothing worse than spending the morning all tingly and warm and inordinately interested in the Jibbitz on your Crocs only to have the veil lifted. He has returned home with a throbbing hole in face to deal with his bored and slightly hyper sister who has insisted on making a well insulated home for the extracted tooth in her jewelry box, complete with colored tissue and glitter and a few stuffed animal friends, until tooth fairy time.

And I’m feeling a little ill and uneasy myself. If any of y’all have ever witnessed your child under the influence of twilight anesthesia then you can relate to my feeling that I have spent the morning watching the high-school version of my O enjoy the effects of a thousand whippets or worse and am now responsible for helping him master the effects of excess. Oh help me God, he really, really liked the Nitrous. Adolescence promises to be a rough ride.

So O is coming to terms with the fact that he has been born with a dental handicap. (I blame My Better Half though he insists his teeth didn’t start to fall out of his head until his late twenties. The estimate we recently received for My Better Half’s dental work exceeded $40,000. Needless to say he’s making due with four good teeth he has left.)

O is stoic in the face of oral surgery. He has even offered to forgo the Nitrous Oxide cocktail that the surgeon recommends for taking the edge during extraction. O, upon learning that the Laughing Gas would cost us $150 extra, had nasty flashbacks of my going a little insane after his last $750 dollar trip to the dentist. He is willing to endure such great discomfort to spare himself the embarrassment that is his mother dumping her purse out on the dentist’s counter and shaking the damn thing, up side down, with the hope that some spare change or a loose $100 would dislodge itself from the lining.

I am not too proud to admit that I called the surgeon yesterday and ventured the idea that my son would like to try the procedure without the Nitrous Oxide. The receptionist didn’t even try to hide her disdain and disbelief. “I will mention this to the doctor, but, Ma’am, it’s highly unusual for us to do an extraction on a child without making the child, well, ‘more comfortable’.” This was receptionist speak for, “Go fuck yourself, you cheap and horrible whore who has no business being a parent.”

So O will be receiving a dose of sunshine while the big bad surgeon reaches a hand into the nether regions of his little head and yanks the offending tooth, dark cavernous cavity and all, from his bleeding gums. I promise I will photograph the pitted remains of molar B for all to see what $350, a medical degree and wrench will buy you.