When my oldest son, Mac, was six-years-old, he announced that one of his teeth was loose. Although six is a perfectly respectable age to lose a tooth, it caught me off guard.
“Already?” I said. “It seems like we were just counting them as they came in.” It seemed that now, together, we would begin counting them as they fell out.
After a week, when the tooth was simply too wiggly, Daddy pulled it out for Mac. We all gathered around to inspect the impossibly tiny, white tooth. Later, I saw Mac holding it on his flat, open palm.
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I presented him with a Tooth Fairy pillow, a tiny pillow with a smiling felt tooth on it and a pocket where he could put his tooth so the Tooth Fairy would know where to find it.
“Good-bye, tooth,” he said, seriously, placing it into the pocket. “I loved you.”
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I almost told him to take the tooth back and keep it, that we’d write a note explaining that he wanted to keep the first one. But somehow, the letting go seemed important.
In the morning, Mac found a five-dollar bill under his pillow, along with two singles – one for each brother. There was a note from the Tooth Fairy explaining that since this was the first tooth lost in the household, everyone got something.
“I got five dollars!” Mac yelled, waving the bill in the air, the sacrifice of his old tooth apparently worth the riches.
For me, I’d always remember the way he took the time to bid his baby tooth farewell. I took the tooth and hid it in the back of my jewelry box, a mother’s proof of the past.
