For weeks I’ve caught her wiggling that tooth out of the corner of my eye.
My daughter Paige, now 12 years old, is nearing the end of her gap-toothed smiles.
But this one tooth seems hesitant to go, and I’ve been telling her I’ll pull it for her, as she shakes her head “no,” looking panicked.
I tell her it’s OK. Just relax. I really won’t mind.
My husband, Justin, “doesn’t do teeth.”
He won’t even look at them once they wiggle at all, and he will gag and carry on if the kids even approach him with one dangling to make him try.
He’s gotten out of a whole lot of dirty work by saying whatever it is is something he “doesn’t do.”
Looking back, I really should have given that method a try…
Therefore, the job of Tooth Fairy has always been on me.
I’ve always been the one creeping into bedrooms, breathing shallowly, shifting heads on pillows in the dark of night.
I’ve been the one who has gotten back up after I’ve already settled in bed, and turned off the light, after suddenly remembering I had a dollar bill to spray with hairspray, and sprinkle with the iridescent glitter I had saved.
I’m not sure when our personal Tooth Fairy decided to also work as a stripper, but our Tooth Fairy dollars were always heavy on the iridescence.
I loved the faces of cashiers when the kids would pay for something later with those dollars.
I’d just make eye contact like,
“Don’t ask questions, Hon. Just bag the toy.”
(With four daughters, making Tooth Fairy Stripper Dollars was a regular craft of mine in the middle of the night.)
“Climb up here on the bed and let me just try to WIGGLE it. I won’t pull it,” I tried to persuade her.
Paige’s eyes grew big, and she shook her head.
“I know what you’re going to do! You’re still going to try!”
But I pinkie promised her to wiggle only.
She lay back on the bed with my hand in her mouth and her big, bulging eyes.
And then something happened as I stood there over her in that second that will forever remain frozen in time –
I truly saw the moment for what it was,
and in it, there was something I realized:
In a few short seconds, if I did succeed,
I would be pulling out the very last tooth of my mothering experience;
The very last loose tooth of the very last child.
There I was, barrelling down a path towards a goal I had set in my mind, without realizing
I would be handing over yet another precious portion of my mothering to be set in the “finished” pile.
Another bit, then another bit, like the hourglass sand of life.
I hovered there thinking about how fast it all goes, and how suddenly you’re faced with being past a hundred “lasts” before you even know what happened.
Just yesterday, it seems, I had my own first baby.
Now, just today, that same baby texted me asking “Has she coughed as much today” about her very own child.
Poor Paige was laying there on the bed with my hand in her mouth, paused, as I thought about this.
I stood in a daze as her eyes looked at me like, “Uh. HELLO?”
She couldn’t know I had stopped in my tracks inside.
She couldn’t know that I was in the process of trying to hold onto time.
It has taken until mid-life to realize how often I am racing on towards the next moment, the next thing, instead of just enjoying the one that I’m in.
So often the exact phase I’m living is one I prayed for, previously.
They may seem plain: Just an average string of days,
but I want to soak them all in, no matter how simple, before I blink again, and they’re gone.
When they were babies, I said I couldn’t wait for my girls to talk.
When they were a little older, I couldn’t wait for them to be even older still, so we could have a whole different kind of fun.
On, and on, jumping with them towards the next step, and the next, until here I am suddenly looking back shocked and aching over how far we’ve come in what felt like just a few hops.
I didn’t pull on Paige’s tooth any more last night, and it had nothing to do with the fact that I had pinkie promised her.
When I told her that was all for tonight, she stood up and grinned, relieved.
I just watched her go.
It took standing there seeing the years fly by like a movie, and realizing I was at the Edge of a Last to realize that, though Justin might cry,
Paige and I both needed at least one more day with a wiggly tooth before those days are done.
Tomorrow can be for growing up.
It can wait one more night.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
