The Beautiful Now

I don’t remember what I was doing the other night -- probably settling into the couch to watch an episode or two of Friends (I just bought season 3; now the only one I don’t have is season 1) to unwind before another too-late bedtime. Both kids had been tucked in for awhile, and my brain was just shy of functioning. So I didn’t hear Suzannah right away. By the time I did, her cry had taken on the urgency that accompanies real fear. It had the panicky “I’m going to throw up” sound to it, to be honest, although Suzannah rarely throws up. Still, the cry meant business.

“Shit,” I mumbled, scrambling to my feet. Before I could reach her she’d already made her way to the kitchen. She pointed tearfully at her mouth.

“Did your tooth come out?” I asked her. She shook her head. “It’s bleeding,” she whimpered. Sure enough, her top front tooth hung by a thread from her bloody gums. This was the same tooth she knocked loose in her fall several days earlier. She doesn’t work at her loose teeth, so they have the potential to remain just barely attached for quite some time before they come out. But while my daughter is a pretty tough kid, she finds the sight of her own blood quite upsetting, and that, combined with the unsettling feel of a barely-there tooth, was too much for her.

“Do you want to try to pull it out?” I asked. She shook her head. “Do you want me to try to pull it out?” She nodded.

So she perched on the lid of the toilet seat, and I tried to pull out that tooth. I’ve never tried to do that before, and as it turns out, small baby teeth are slippery and not easy to grip. I tried with a washcloth, but after a tug, Suzannah gave a little sob and pulled away.

“It’s okay, Bug,” I said. “We don’t have to do it tonight. Let’s just rinse out your mouth and leave it alone for now. It’ll be fine.” I wrapped my arms around her and she rested her head on my shoulder. She let me rock her like that for a long time, and then I tucked her back into bed.

It was such a small moment, really, but it was also unspeakably sweet and kind of heart-wrenching in a way that defies words.

Fast forward a few nights. Shortly past three o’clock in the morning, I woke to our daughter standing beside our bed.

“My tooth came out,” she whispered.

I sat up. “Where is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did it fall on the floor?” Shrug.

“Do you think you swallowed it?”

“I don’t know.”

I sighed. “Okay. Why don’t you climb in here for a bit.” So Suzannah crawled under the covers in our bed, and I spent the next ten minutes blearily searching through the folds in her sheets with no success. I crouched down on the floor and ran my hands over the carpet. I reached under the bed, thinking only about the spider my husband had allowed to escape behind the bookshelf in her room a couple of months ago. (Suzannah does not like the sight of her own blood, but she is remarkably unconcerned about spiders in her room. Obviously she hasn’t considered the possibility that the spider her father allowed to escape has since become a grandmother, probably, to lots of other horrible spiders that are waiting for a night like this in which to scurry over my hand while I’m searching for a lost tooth.)

It felt kind of absurd and surreal -- this crawling and groping around on my daughter’s floor, searching for a baby tooth at three o’clock in the morning -- but also, the one perfectly clear, coherent thought that came to me was that this is the very essence of motherhood.

I did not find the tooth.

I returned to our room and said something about writing the tooth fairy a note, about how she would understand that the tooth was lost but would see the gap in Suzannah’s mouth and get the message and probably leave her a little something anyway. Suzannah accepted this and allowed me to usher her back to her own bed. (“Do you think she could have really swallowed it?” Matt mumbled in the dark, sounding worried.)

A couple of hours later, after my alarm jarred me out of sleep but before I showered, I crept into Suzannah’s room once again and left two quarters in her tooth pillow. Two quarters is the going rate for teeth in our house these days. It was also, as I recall, the going rate for teeth back when I was losing them, so probably she is supposed to get more money or bigger presents or whatever, but really it’s not about that -- it’s about the shiny coins. It’s the symbolism. It’s about the satisfying plink of those coins dropping into her piggy bank. So two quarters it is, despite the fact that her friend Kathryn apparently gets, like, five dollars per tooth. (First graders compare such things, it seems. For the time-being, though, Suzannah seems blessedly unperturbed by the difference.)

(Later, Matt -- still worried about the possibility that Suzannah had swallowed the tooth -- searched for it himself. He covered the same territory, obviously, but seven-thirty in the morning is decidedly different from three-thirty in the morning, and he emerged triumphantly from her room a few moments later. “Found it,” he said, more relieved than proud. He really was worried about the potential swallowing. I thought it was unlikely, but also, it must happen, right? No one ever hears about first graders needing actual medical intervention because they swallowed a tooth, right?)

She lost another tooth the following night. This one had been loose for a long time, prior to her fall. She seemed concerned about losing two in such quick succession, but we hugged her and high-fived her and made jokes about turning into a jack-o-lantern, which made her giggle. The tooth fairy nearly forgot to visit the second time, so when Suzannah woke up nearly an hour earlier than usual to check her pillow, I managed to convince her to go to the bathroom first -- I told her that the tooth fairy likes to visit just before she wakes up, and she had other houses to visit and it was a busy night and she might not quite be ready and I don’t even know, it was ridiculous, and Suzannah looked at me skeptically but humored me anyway, and by the time she returned to her room there were the two shiny quarters! Like magic. I love that my daughter indulges me like this.

It’s not a big thing, really. Kids lose their baby teeth, and it becomes routine, like so many other parts of growing up. And I suppose it’s like any other milestone -- potty training, for instance, or eating solids for the first time. In other words, interesting only in the child’s own household, even though the parents’ friends will pretend to be interested and excited on their behalf. I really do understand this; I was fundamentally uninterested in these things until I experienced them myself. But this is the essence of parenthood. It’s not really about the milestone itself; it’s about the tiny moments contained within. It’s rocking my daughter as she perches on the toilet seat, marveling at how she seems so vulnerable but also so grown. It’s crawling around on her bedroom floor, squinting against the light at three-thirty in the morning, searching for this tiny little chip of a tooth without questioning why. It’s improvising these little stories for her (and for me), it’s framing these experiences in intentional ways so that she feels safe and valued and finds the joy in them, as we do.

That’s where the joy hangs out. And so we celebrate our little gap-toothed girl, who still delights in discovering quarters in her tooth pillow, who can still perch on the toilet seat without her feet quite reaching the floor and let me hold her, just hold her, and I know that what matters is not the tooth and not the quarters but the noticing, the remembering, the staying present, the juxtaposition of the baby and the girl and all her future selves. The moment. The beautiful now.