Curse the Tooth Fairy

"The Tooth Fairy left my tooth."

My six year old stood beside my desk with a zipped snack bag in her tiny hand. Stuck in a corner of the bag was a miniscule, jagged white tooth. My daughter's facial expression revealed that she was confused and a bit angry, but not upset--at least not yet.

I stared at the tooth as though it were a piece of nuclear waste.

"Oh!" I shouted as I jumped from the chair.

Running up the basement stairs, my daughter and the tooth trailing after me, I tried to think up a plausible reason why the Tooth Fairy had done something so idiotic.

"Well, you know, sometimes she gets confused. Like, remember that time when she accidentally put the money for your sister under your pillow?"

"Yeah," she said, her lithe body right on my heels. "That was kinda dumb."

"Yes, well, it happens," I said as I spun around a few times in the kitchen, trying to come up with a way to make this work. "Maybe she thought you were in a different bed. A lot of times you end up in our bed in the middle of the night."

There! My purse was hanging on the closet door knob. If I could snatch it and get upstairs before she saw me, I could deposit a buck on the floor beside her bed and tell her it must have fallen from under her pillow.

But this little kid was right on my tail. She watched me as I lifted the strap of the purse from the knob and bolted like lightning up the stairs.

"Okay," she said in her sophisticated, six-year-old speak, "what I don't get is, why would she be confused about where to put the money if she saw me in my own bed? And why didn't she take the tooth? It's weird, isn't it?"

Why are you asking so many questions? I thought to myself. I've got to think here!

"You check your brother and sister's rooms, just in case. I'll check your room again." I needed to get rid of her so I could pull this together.

She opened the door to one bedroom, only to see her sister lying fast asleep in her own bed. She quickly shut the door. The only thing worse than being gypped by the tooth fairy is incurring the wrath of your older sister after you rouse her from a deep sleep.

"I'll check Dominic's room," she said.

I absentmindedly went into my room instead of hers. There, I tore open the flap of my purse and rummaged through receipts and library cards. My fingers were like big, clumsy blocks of cement as I tried to work as quickly as possible. A ten dollar bill drifted in the air, and five pennies clanked onto the floor. I think a four-letter word spilled out of my mouth about the same time.

"No, it's not under his pillow," my daughter called. She flung his pillows and bed covers to the foot of his bed.

I was running out of time. I scooped up the money that had fallen on the floor and fumbled for a dollar in my purse. I grabbed it, threw my purse in my closet and ran to the nearest pillow: mine. I stuffed the dollar under the floral pillow case.

"Why don't you look in our room," I called, acting very nonchalant. "You never know."

My daughter seemed to be as annoyed with me as she was with the Tooth Fairy. "Why would she leave it in here? You and Daddy aren't losing anymore teeth!"

"Just check," I insisted. "Maybe she thought you were in here last night."

"But..."

"Just check!" I was losing my cool.

"Okay."

She slid her little hand under the pillow and pulled out a dollar. For several seconds, her eyes were fixed on that beautiful green bill. "Wow!" she exclaimed. "A dollar!"

"Yes, well, see, the Tooth Fairy may get confused sometimes, but she always ends up making people happy."

I literally was sweating. If it hadn't been 8 in the morning, I might have had to pour myself a glass of wine to calm down.

As excited as she was about the dollar, she still couldn't figure out what had possessed the Tooth Fairy to act like such a bumbling boob. If this is your job, and the only one you apparently have, how could you botch it up so badly?

"How does the Tooth Fairy know I lost a tooth anyway?" she asked as we headed down the stairs.

"Um, she's in with Santa. And he keeps her updated on who loses teeth."

"So how come Santa couldn't tell her where to put the tooth?"

Is it time for that wine yet?

"Even Santa gets confused sometimes. Plus, you guys are always hopping out of your own beds and into ours, and so maybe he told her to check in our room first and she saw a body and even though it was your brother's and there wasn't a tooth under the pillow she figured she'd leave the money there."

Wow, how'd you come up with that brilliant deduction, Sherlock?

My daughter decided she'd expended enough energy trying to solve this conundrum. "Boy, that Tooth Fairy," she said as she rolled up her new dollar and headed to the TV room.

"Yes, that Tooth Fairy," I said, shaking my head.

Later that evening, I explained everything to my husband.

"I mean, I wasn't even thinking last night about the Tooth Fairy coming," I said.

"Apology accepted," he sarcastically replied.

"What!" I almost popped him on the head. Since when did the Tooth Fairy become only the mom's responsibility? "I'd accept your apology, too," I called from behind the door I'd just slammed, "if you'd offer one."

The truth is, we've both gotten a little lax about the Tooth Fairy. After three kids and umpteen teeth, the novelty wears off, at least for the parents. So one assumes the other is still keen about the job and will shoulder the responsibility, but the other one's thoughts are focused on loading the dishwasher or paying the bills or watching some grownup TV.

The result: a negligent Tooth Fairy, two guilt-ridden parents and one annoyed child holding a tooth he or she had planned on trading in for some cash.

Luckily, these rituals don't last forever. My nine-year-old has already begun to see the light. "I don't think the Tooth Fairy's real," she whispered to me while I was tucking her in one night not that long ago.

"Why not?"

"Because, someone at school said she saw her mom put money under her pillow."

It would be perfectly fine for me to tell a nine-year-old that, yes, her friend is right. The Tooth Fairy is really a mom or dad.

But knowing my oldest child, she would hold onto this shocking truth until she needed ammunition during a dramatic battle with her younger sister. Then, just at the moment that the little one had managed to get her goat, fix her wagon and bust her chops, she would pull out her weapon for the ultimate blow. "Oh yeah?" I could just hear her saying in her sassy voice, with her sassy hands on her sassy hips. "Well, there's no Tooth Fairy! So what do you think about that?"

I simply don't have the emotional strength to deal with that right now.

So I tell the nine-year-old, "If you want to believe in the Tooth Fairy, you keep believing, and let your friend have her own ideas." She seemed satisfied and drifted off to sleep. And so the fantasy continues in our house.

One of the greatest things about kids is their ability to forgive. They also like to offer the chance to try something over in the hopes that the other person--or in this case, the fairy--will get it right.

After my little one had finished ranting about the Tooth Fairy's bumbling mistake, she took the plastic bag with the tooth upstairs and stuck it back under her pillow. "I'm putting that back," she said, "to see if she takes it tonight... and leaves me a little more money."

The Tooth Fairy got the message: Finish the project, and leave some change to cover the cost of emotional duress.

Working Mom, Crazy Mom? Part Two: When It's Time to Change, You've Got to Rearrange

Every new mom is a sleep-deprived mom. If you find one who tells you she doesn't feel groggy most of the day, she's either lying to you or she has round-the-clock nanny service.

Part of the problem is that infants don't really have a set routine, no matter how much you try to create one for them. Their sleep patterns can change from week to week or even day to day; they become more active with each passing hour; and you never know what's going to set them off and have them crying and in need of their mothers' arms.

In short, your life is not your own when you're a mom.

When my first child turned six months old, I decided to devote my days to her. Outside of her nap time and the hour she spent in the babysitting room at the YMCA while I worked out, she was my constant companion, and her needs dictated almost every move I made. I still intended to write, but there wasn't time in the day for that, so it was time to make a few adjustments.

The beauty of working from home is that you can do it anytime you like and in whatever clothes you choose. As long as you make your deadlines, you could be working at 3 in the morning in a bunny suit and your employers wouldn't care.

So my workday became my work night. At 10:30 p.m., once the baby and my husband were safely in bed, I would slip into my pajamas and start my writing assignments. Those were my younger days, when there was no internal clock telling me it was way past my bedtime. I would simply work until the work got done.

Some evenings I wrote from 10:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. At other times, when I was faced with more than one deadline at a time, my work night was much, much longer. I distinctly remember several occasions when I dragged my exhausted body to bed, only to hear my husband's alarm sound off five minutes later. Luckily, the baby was past getting up in the middle of the night, and because we put her to bed late, she usually didn't stir until at least 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning.

The work got done, my child's needs were being met, and all seemed right with the world. Except for one thing: If I didn't get more than five hours of sleep in a night, I was...well, I guess you could say mean. Or moody. Or forgetful. Or crazed. Or all of the above. In short, as I look back, I was a mess several days out of the week.

At the time, I certainly didn't see myself as a sleep-deprived lunatic. I was just doing what I thought was natural: taking care of a house and a child during the day and working all night. That sounds completely natural and doable, doesn't it?

My husband appreciated the extra money I was bringing in, but not the extra doses of mania and hormonal imbalances. "No one asked you to stay up all night writing," he said to me on more than one occasion after I had ranted and raved about how tired I was. Well, no, but I had to stay up to get the work done, didn't I?

Who knows. Before we saw just how crazy I could become from my nutty schedule, the situation changed. Another baby plopped into our lives. And then another. And soon I found myself with three children under the age of four, a big house to care for, a husband to keep relatively happy and a workload that would have been doable if I didn't also have the full-time career of motherhood.

Instead of throwing in the writing towel and choosing to focus on the ultimately more important, albeit less financially rewarding, job of being a housewife, I changed my schedule again. And again. And again. Each time a new child arrived or one child developed a new sleeping habit, I adjusted my work schedule to accommodate.

The process worked, for the most part. I made sacrifices in a lot of areas, missing a deadline to care for a sick child, or worse, missing the opportunity to play "Simon Says" with my children so I could complete a project. No matter how I rearranged, I couldn't stay caught up with everything. One thing always managed to catch up with me, though: GUILT. Oh, the guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt.

But we'll save that story for next time.

Illegal or Immoral: What's More Important to Teach our Children?

Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz wrote in Sundays' newspaper about the frighteningly popular trend of teens taking and distributing naked pictures of themselves. Eight people between the ages of 14 and 16, all students at a suburban Cleveland high school, were distributing naked photos that were originally taken by a young girl who wanted to show her ex-boyfriend "what he was missing."

None of the kids knew that circulating such photos was illegal. Even more surprisingly,none of them seemed to know it was just plain wrong.

Schultz's column encourages parents to talk about the dangers of circulating naked photos because, if caught, they could be labeled sexual predators, a title that will follow them for years into their adulthood.

No parent wants his or her child going to juvenile court and possibly having a horrible moniker attached to his or her name. So how best to keep this from happening: Do you first explain that acts such as distributing nude photos is illegal, or do you start by explaining that such acts are immoral? Do you stress that it would be unfortunate to be labeled a criminal, or is it more important to stress the disrespect they are showing their own body or someone else's?

Here's the difference between my working class, ethnic upbringing and what seems to be going on today: If I had done something as stupid as distribute naked photos of myself to others when I was a teenager and my parents had found out, they would have slapped me upside the head and told me I had disgraced our family name and greatly embarrassed them. Believe me, I grew up believing that embarrassing my parents was far worse punishment than having to appear in juvenile court.

And if I had gotten tossed in JD or been held by the police, my parents would have left me there for a good long time in order to get their point across: What you did was really wrong and we are really, really, really upset. I imagine that it would have been safer for me to have spent a few days in a prison cell than go home and face my parents if I had committed a crime, especially one that involved exposing my naked body to others.

If my father's sisters did something deemed imprudent by the family, my Italian-born grandmother would say to them, "Non you shame-a youself." It was a simple sentence that, translated from broken English, means don't do something that you'll regret or that will cause others to look down on you.

Is there any action out there today that is deemed immoral or embarrassing? Increasingly, our moral code has been shot to hell. If it feels good, do it. Oh, but it could be illegal, so watch out.

Certainly there will be people who will say that if you tell a girl or boy that it's immoral to be nude then you're also telling them they should be ashamed of their bodies. Please note the difference: The human body in and of itself is a beautiful thing, but when someone (especially a young person) exposes the naked body to taunt someone else or to get a few kicks, that is degrading and demeaning.

Yes, we have to teach our children about right and wrong through the eyes of the court, but what about through our own eyes? What do you think about this?

Let It "V"

It's only late September, and we're already in crisis homework mode at our house. Last evening, my daughter threw herself down on the dining room chair, shaking her head repeatedly as she chanted, "I can't do it! I can't do it!" It is a cursive lower-case "v."

Two weeks ago, she missed two words on her spelling test. In one word, her "v" looked like an "r"; in another, the "v" looked like a "w." In other words, she spelled the words right, but she wrote the letter "v" wrong.

At first I felt bad for her. What a shame, to know how to spell a word but miss it because you're having trouble with one of your cursive letters. I believe I even said something embarrassingly old-fashioned like, "When I was a kid, we never had spelling tests in cursive." (Why didn't I just go all out and announce that they hadn't even invented cursive when I was in grade school?)

Then it dawned on me that it wasn't I who was deciding what my daughter did and didn't need to know. It was the teacher; the person with whom I trust my child five days a week. If she thinks that a third grader should be comfortable enough with her cursive letters to use them on a spelling test, she's probably right.

Thus, the attitude at home immediately changed to, "Well, you just have to practice your "v." Which she has been doing. But she's still not doing them the right way.

And after an hour of frantic erasing, pencil-throwing and screaming, my daughter sits before me crumpled and defeated. Which leads me to do the only thing I can think of at this desperate point: Fix the letter for her. This is on her weekly homework assignment where she must write all of her spelling words twice, in cursive of course.

I wrote the "v" on the first word for her, certain that my little bit of assistance would no doubt help her to master the letter. "Do it just like this the second time," I tell her. She tries. She fails. The word "divide" looks like "diride." She passes the paper to me and looks at me hopefully, but she knows she's missed the mark. And again she crumples.

"It's fine," I assure her. "You tried your best. Let's step away from it for now and come back to it later." But she doesn't want to come back to it later. She now hates the letter "v" and every word that contains the letter, and she wants to rid herself of all memories of "v" for the evening. I decide to leave her alone.

This morning, I opened her yellow homework folder and stared at her spelling assignment. How easy would it be for me to correct the "v" again? Wouldn't it be helping her to see what a proper "v" looks like?

But I realized, while changing the letter might help her to receive a check-plus on her paper, it wouldn't help her to take responsibility for her work, nor would it allow her teacher to see that she has a problem that needs attention. I can't be right beside her on the day of the spelling test, quietly erasing her flawed letter and replacing it with a more proper version.

Looking at the bigger picture, I won't be right beside her down the road, when she's studying for college exams, applying for a job or raising her kids. She's going to make mistakes, but hopefully she'll learn from them. And maybe learning the hard way to write a proper "v" is just the beginning of lessons that will make her a strong, responsible person, who hopefully also has great penmanship.

Learning to let go when your child is about to make a mistake: That was my big lesson of the day.

Call It Coincidence...

A day after the anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the historic acceptance speech by Barack Obama, on the birthday of both John McCain and Michael Jackson (could we find two more disparate people born on the same day, by the way?) and on the day before my 44th birthday (at which point I will begrudgingly agree to call myself middle-aged), I happily post my first blog on this site.

First, I need to set the mood. I sit before my computer at my "lovely" home office, a pile of laundered clothes rumpled on the floor beside me. Pictures drawn by my three children hang lopsided on the cement wall behind the computer. Three Post It notes stuck to the screen taunt me with "to do" items that must be completed by the end of the day. C-Span's live call-in show, my favorite morning program, blares in the background. Every few seconds, I look at the clock and hold my breath as I wonder when the youngest member of the family will come traipsing into the basement and want to play a game that does not involve mommy writing her articles.

This picture gives you an idea of the complex life I lead. Part mom, part writer, part madwoman. I am not different from a lot of other people out there, although sometimes I feel as though I am. Everyday, I find myself learning a new lesson about parenting, housekeeping, working, being a wife and much more. Each day (or so I hope), I will share some of the more interesting lessons because I think it's important that my follies provide a chuckle or two. 

And just like that, the four-year-old pads across the basement floor, taps me on the shoulder and says, "Let's watch kids' shows." Let the games begin....