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By Anna Rahmanan
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Earlier this week, my almost-seven-year-old daughter lost her second tooth. Yes, I know it’s late, but...genetics.
After excitedly handing me the envelope with her loose tooth right off the school bus and screaming, “I’m getting money!” she stopped in the middle of the street, turned to me and said, “Mom, are you the Tooth Fairy?”
Now, an expert at dodging questions I haven’t yet figured out the answer to, I just asked why she was asking.
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“My friends told me,” she said.
I shrugged my shoulders and told her she only had 15 minutes to do her homework before tennis.
I immediately felt guilty. Not about not answering her, but about putting her in the position I probably dread most—being the only girl in her friend group not in the know.
It’s not that I’m not ready to tell her the truth. I think she could handle it, with the obvious caveat that she cannot tell her five-year-old sister and three younger brothers, who certainly deserve the same level of whimsy and excitement I saw in my firstborn’s eyes at 6 a.m. the morning after she lost her first tooth and discovered a letter written by yours truly with $10 inside. Still one of my proudest writing projects.
I don’t even think I mind shattering this particular bit of childhood because the consequences would be fairly limited. I would bet serious money that she will simply start handing me the teeth directly and asking for the $10 herself.
What gives me anxiety is everything else.
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Right now, the world is still perfect and exciting and full of fairies for her. Mine feels considerably less so, and some days I have enough trouble dealing with reality myself. I’m not sure why I should be in such a hurry to introduce more of it to her.
The Tooth Fairy interrogation continued until last night, when she asked me while I was washing the dishes to please, seriously, tell her the truth. Once again, thankfully, she got distracted.
And it made me think about all the much bigger things we eventually have to tell our kids about.
She was in school for the anniversary of September 11, which they called Memorial Day, and the children were encouraged to wear red, white and blue. I didn’t mind any of that. I just knew she was going to come home and ask me, "Why today, mamma?"
I wouldn't know how to answer that.
It isn’t death itself that I struggle to explain. My grandmother died a while back and I told my kids about it straightforwardly. They understand that someone can no longer be physically accessible, although they remain deeply confused by the whole body-in-the-ground part.
September 11 is different because it invites the next question. Why would someone hijack a plane? What is hijacking? Why would someone do that?
I don’t want her getting on the next flight wondering whether somebody might crash it. But mostly, I don’t know how to answer the why because I don’t know why. I don’t know why horrible things happen.
The anniversary of October 7 is coming up too, a date that profoundly changed me, and I’ve been thinking about whether to even broach it with my daughter, who happens to turn seven on October 7 this year. Yes, I'm aware, that's really not ideal.
It isn’t really that I don’t know how to explain these things. I trust there are child psychologists and school counselors who could give me exactly the right words.
I just don’t want her to know yet that this is also the world I brought her into.
Because I remain steadfastly convinced that there is more beauty and excitement and fun here than the opposite. I know it when my four children are, for once, not screaming at each other. I know it watching Dancing With the Stars with my daughters at night or kicking a soccer ball around with my sons. Sometimes I look up and say thank you because my heart feels almost embarrassingly full.
Maybe that is why I’m having such a hard time answering one very simple question.
Eventually, she will know about September 11 and October 7 and so many other bad things. She will know that terrible things happen for reasons her mother cannot explain, and that adults do not have nearly as many answers as children assume we do. We're just as lost as we used to be as kids, only now somebody is asking us why.
So perhaps I don’t need to be the one who tells her about the Tooth Fairy just yet, reality has a way of introducing itself, clearly. For now, the fairy can keep the $10 job a little longer.
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