What I almost forgot

I spent all day yesterday chanting to myself, don’t forget the Tooth Fairy, don’t forget the Tooth Fairy, knowing if I didn’t, it’d just be all over. Tuesday and Thursday I have my night class for the next couple of months, which in principle is fine, and the class is going well, but it gets out so late. I haven’t taught the class before, and all my advisees show up late afternoons, so before it’s all over, I am just randomly flinging around papers and books like a maniac trying to get ready. Then when class lets out, I usually spend a few minutes picking up. So 8:30’s the earliest I’ve left campus this week; the first night I came home everybody was already asleep. That day I saw my husband and children for a grand total of 45 minutes in the morning while we were all running around juggling cereal boxes and showering and packing lunches and yelling about the whether it’s warm enough to wear short sleeves (which is pretty much is right now). I drove home last night with all deliberate speed—don’t forget the Tooth Fairy—and got home at 9:00, so I did get to see my little people, but Chris was cranky because they were almost asleep when I came in and disrupted the universe.

I snuggled up with everybody in Chris’s and my bed, and boom, before you know it, we were happily snoozing away, that lost tooth still waiting in its fancy pillow. I woke up this morning at 5:00 from a dream about boxes of Barbie dolls thinking, oh my God, I forgot the Tooth Fairy! Fortunately nobody’s up at 5:00, and nobody really knows what time the Tooth Fairy shows up anyway, so no harm done. And Chris remembered too when he work up at 5:45, so even if I had forgotten, all would have been well. Maybe the all-day chant worked. Maybe that last repetition in the car just dug that sentence down into my subconscious, which somehow connected it to Barbies and presented me with my little 5:00 a.m. mental alarm. And it’s not as if Laura doesn’t know who the Tooth Fairy is or would probably care that much if she got her two bucks (price adjusted for inflation—remember how we would get quarters?) after her Lucky Charms instead of before. But Lord, the 5:00 feeling of panic. All over a little yucky lost tooth that I throw in the trash.

I have this aunt who saved all my cousin’s baby teeth in a little cloisonné box, and presented her with it when she left for college, which I just think is disgusting. It is rather odd, though, to think about parts of our bodies lying around in the trash, scattered at different layers as time passes between each lost canine. There must be some middle ground between the total attention that box of teeth represents and the sense that I have of having practically abandoned my parental responsibility (and never mind the fact that the all-day chant thing keeps it pretty well in the foreground). How much does all this matter in the end? Last night’s not the first time I almost forgot—but having never completely forgotten, will any of this make any difference to Laura one day? Who knows. All I know is at home, I’m always worrying about grading or something I haven’t done for class, and at work, I’m always worrying about forgetting the Tooth Fairy. I am not doing so hot a job of living in the moment. Maybe I should add that to my list of resolutions.