Lady of the House

by Sharon J. O'Donnell

Will the real Tooth Fairy please stand up?

At my house, it is usually up to me to carry out the details of playing Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. And I’ve done a pretty good job of it through the years with my three sons ages 15, 12, and six. Up until last week I’d forgotten to play ‘Tooth Fairy’ during the night only once. That was years ago when my middle son lost a tooth, and when he woke up the next morning and saw the Tooth Fairy hadn’t come, I had to think fast to salvage his belief in this institution of childhood. I told him maybe the money fell on the floor or got lost in his sheets while he was sleeping. As we were searching for the money, I placed a few dollar bills in a crevice between the wall and his pillow. Eureka!

Then last week, my 6-year-old, Jason, lost his third tooth. The next morning — a Saturday — I was lying in bed trying to steal a couple of minutes of rest when I heard Jason get up and go downstairs where my husband was having breakfast. I heard their voices drone on as I tried to drift back to sleep. Then I heard Jason exclaim excitedly as he remembered, “My tooth!”

His footsteps hurried down the hall. My eyes flew open wide as I suddenly realized I hadn’t played Tooth Fairy during the night. I was so drowsy I completely forgot about the solution of putting the money in the sheets.
 
As Jason bounded up the stairs, closer to his room, I jumped out of bed, ran around the corner and met him halfway up the stairs. I grabbed his arm and said, “Jason, wait a second,” as my mind tried to come up with a plan.

I leaned over and looked closely at his right eye, which is prone to allergies. “Your eye looks red, sweetheart,’ I told him. “Let me see it.” I took a closer look as he tried to pull away from me.

“Mom, my tooth!” he yelled.

“I know, I know,” I replied, pulling him down the stairs toward the kitchen. “Let me get the eye drops from the cabinet first.”

“Mom!” he protested. By this time, my husband, Kevin, had figured out that the Tooth Fairy had been neglectful of her duties the previous night and so he went into the kitchen to the stand where he keeps his wallet.

I pulled Jason over near the stand, so that it was just around the corner from us. I stuck my right arm around the corner where Kevin stood rummaging through his wallet, while I distracted Jason by looking closely at his eye. But he was, by that time, pulling away from me because he really wanted to go upstairs.

Just as I felt Kevin put the dollars in my outstretched hand, Jason broke away and sprinted up the stairs with me in hot pursuit a few steps behind.
As we rounded the banister, I gained a few steps on him. “I want to see the
Tooth Fairy surprise first,” he shouted, probably wondering what had happened to his rational mom.

“You will,” I yelled, “But I’m coming, too.”

We both flew up the stairs, down the hallway, and into his room. He was a split second behind me. I felt like we were in one of those slow motion replays of two opposing football players looking in the air as the football spirals down toward them, their hands outstretched, the outcome in doubt until the last possible second. I lunged toward the bed, raising up the pillow at the same time. I dropped the money, and the pillow fell back down, just as Jason came from behind me, sticking his hand under the pillow. He smiled, pulled the money out, and said, “Got it.”

Such precision. A thing of beauty. I felt like I’d just made a touchdown. Yet, I didn’t know if my athletic actions had been so quick that Jason had not seen my fast slight of hand when I slid the money under the pillow or if he was simply choosing to ignore the fact he’d just seen the real Tooth Fairy in action.

We both sat there on his bedroom floor, a little out of breath. “So what do
you think?” I asked, giving him a chance to let me know he’d seen the whole
thing. I prepared myself for my ‘truth about the Tooth Fairy’ speech.

“About what?” he asked. Hmm. Maybe I’d pulled it off after all.
 
“Was anything weird about finding that money?”

“Nope,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Then he took the crumpled money out of his hand and I saw it was a 10 dollar bill. Ten dollars? We’d never given 10 bucks for a tooth! I guess that was all Kevin could find in his wallet on such short notice. “Wow, it’s a 10!” Jason said in awe.

“Yeah,” I replied, amazed that my frugal husband had come through in the clutch for the Tooth Fairy. I still probed a bit to make sure Jason hadn’t seen anything.

“Why do you think the Tooth Fairy gave you 10 dollars?” I thought perhaps he might say ‘because that’s what Dad gave you.’

He thought for a moment and then said, “I guess she thought it was a really good tooth.” Then he started playing video games. So I assumed my child was oblivious to my morning’s plight. But I won’t be surprised if one day when he’s a teenager he says, “Mom remember that time you raced me upstairs to see what the Tooth Fairy brought – I knew all along it was you.”  Now all I have to do is figure out how to explain to him he won’t get $10 for any more of his teeth.

Sharon J. O’Donnell is an award-winning newspaper columnist, who specializes in  humor columns.  Since 1998, Sharon has been a columnist for The Cary News, in Cary, NC (just outside of Raleigh) and has won awards for those columns.  She has also written for Good Housekeeping, The News & Observer, and Blue Mountain Arts greeting cards. 

Sharon is a 1984 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (she used to live in the same dorm as Michael Jordan!!) with a degree in print/broadcast journalism.  Since then she’s worked in radio promotions, special events planning, public speaking, and public relations.

Her current project is a humorous book of essays about what it’s like to be the only woman in a houseful of males, dealing with a husband, three sons, and a male dog. 

Sharon also writes fiction.  In 1997, her novel manuscript, Hand-Me-Downs, was a finalist in the Heekin Group Foundation’s James Fellowship for the novel-in-progress division.  An excerpt from her current novel-in-progress, Bluebirds Fly, was published in the Sunday Reader section of The News & Observer, the Raleigh paper, in December of 2002.  In the spring of 2003, she won third place in the short story division of The Paul Gillette Memorial Writing Contest, sponsored by the Pikes Peak Writers Conference.

Since 2000, she’s taught narrative writing through week-long writing residency workshops in schools and is a writer-in-residence through the United Arts Council.  She has also done public relations consulting that has resulted in successful media coverage for various programs and events.

Jacob’s Ladder, a volunteer group she helped start in honor of her nephew who underwent a successful bone marrow transplant in 1993, won a national award called the HOPE award in 1997 for raising testing money and promoting the bone marrow registry to minorities.

She lives in Cary with her husband Kevin and their three sons ages 14, 11, and 5 (ages of this writing in late 2005).

Her Websites are www.momsofboys.org and www.sharonodonnell.com.

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