Anthropological thinking required me to rearrange my brain and it's considerations and that semester I came into the idea that we really start to leave the world of childhood thinking and move into more cognitive thinking once we wrap our minds around the concepts of time and space.
We can believe just about anything so long as the constraints of time and space don't apply. When did you stop believing in Santa Claus? In the tooth fairy? Was it right around the time you started to realize that it might be really hard for a jolly, fat man to pull that sleigh around the world and back in the course of one snowy night?
This was part of the tooth fairy politics. In our family, Santa and the Tooth Fairy (note: I still capatilize) leave little notes to Ella when ever they come to visit. Usually, the notes are little words of encouragement or 'thank you for the carrot sticks for the reindeer. they really appreciated your thoughtfullness.' But a few months back, at the kitchen table, out of the blue, Ella asked me why I had written that last tooth fairy note. I felt like I was fifteen all over again, busted for one thing or another at my parent's kitchen table, sitting there frozen in the moment, deciding whether or not I should fess up or lie through my teeth. Saying nothing, she went upstairs and came back down with the note in one hand and, in the other, the journal from which the paper for the note had been ripped.
I found myself in the position I absolutely never wanted to be in. I was never sure about feeding her the whole Santa and Tooth Fairy story. But that was when she was very young and so was I and I think maybe my parenting ideals then were a little more grandieos than they are now.
When she was six months old and her first Christmas was approaching, I stood in line with her dad debating whether or not to raise her with the Santa illusion. Whether or not it's setting your kid up for a fall, regardless of how culturally widespread the illusion might be. Mid-discussion, in the check-out line, we started looking around at what we saw. Little Saint Nicks everywhere. We started imagining strangers asking our daughter, "What did Santa bring you for Christmas?" and our daughter feeling extremely left out of the Christmas club. So, when she was old enough to directly as whether or not Santa was real, we took the middle of the line approach and responded that "some people believe in Santa..." and we said it like an unfinished sentence, like a question mark, trailing off at the end, leaving it kind of wide open. By that time though, Ella was already a militant believer in anything imaginary and so it didn't really matter what we said or believed anyway.
So, whether it's Santa or the Tooth Fairy or dragons or mermaids, she remains pretty steadfast that anyone who doesn't believe is just a pretty sad case. Her main frustration with me writing that letter from the tooth fairy wasn't the fact that I had lied to her ~ although, that really did tick her off ~ it was more that I had intervened. I was putting myself in the way of magic happening. But I had come clean. I had told her then and there that I was the tooth fairy and she still chooses to believe.
I envy that.
So after her double molar extraction yesterday, when I put her two rooted teeth into the pocket of the tooth fairy pillow and kissed her goodnight, she looked me deep in the eye and warned me not to be the tooth fairy. So, I knew that if I opted to leave the dollar bills and herkimer crystals under her pillow, she'd wake up with a completely renergized conviction or she'd totally call my bluff. And, hours later, when it came time to go to bed, I asked my long lost child-less psychologist friend just how to deal with the Tooth Fairy dilemma. Do I go ahead and perpetuate the myth or do I let it go now? At one point do you let it go?
In kindgergarden she befriended a very sweet, Christopher Robin type of boy who was seriously into video games. The first time I took her to his house to play she was fascinated with all the posters in his room. Posters of video game, Yugi-O and Pokeman characters. They had had an ongoing debate up to this point about whether or not dragons were real and she was doing her best to argue her case. Peace had been made by the time I came to pick her up that evening and Ben had been converted to a true believer. The next time I took her to his house, a few months later, the posters in his room had been taken down and replaced by every kind of dragon you could possibly begin to imagine.
I wonder if they'll move into adulthood looking in caves for dragon eggs. They do take 100 years to hatch, you know? That would make me really proud. Ella is learning this year how to tell time. I haven't been in a rush for that to happen. We spend enough of our long lives worrying about it. I figure that if I can spare her a few extra years without that burden, all the better. But the understanding is starting to sink in. It's almost as easy now as frying an egg or counting by tens.
Ben has since moved away, down to the New Hampshire coast, but we get cards from him about twice a year. The last one was a Halloween card that read:
Dear Ella,
What were you for Halloween? I was a grim reaper.
I miss you. Dragons are real.
Love Ben
No comments:
Post a Comment