I saw this writing prompt on Mama’s losing it and just had to tell this little nugget of my childhood.
I was about 5-6 years old and I was in my mom’s bedroom for some reason and I found a little box with teeth in it. At this point in time I was still a Tooth Fairy believer, so of course my first thought was whose teeth are these, and because I knew mine had been taken away by the Tooth Fairy. I was totally freaked out and demanded to know whose teeth these were and how/why my mother had them.
My mom was in one of her long-term relationships, and the boyfriend in question saw this as a great opportunity for him to get more involved with me and proposed to my mom that he be the one to explain it to me.
So he took me to my mom’s room, where I had made the gruesome discovery, and started to explain to me about how the tooth fairy was made up by moms and dads, while my mom sat in the living room waiting apprehensively to see how this would go.
Next thing she knew, I was wailing and crying and running from the bedroom into her arms, the boyfriend following behind me totally confused by my reaction. My mom couldn’t understand a word I was trying to say because of my big gulping sobs, so she asked him what had happened.
He told her that all he did was sit me down to explain that the Tooth Fairy was something that moms and dads made up to make things more fun for kids, just like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
My mom looked at him, furious, and explained that I didn’t know that the other ones weren’t real, and that he should have just stuck to the Tooth Fairy.
Bam!…my childhood innocence shot to hell with one sentence. All of the childhood mythology gone at once. Now I laugh about it, and can imagine how horrible the guy felt, but I remember it took me a very very long time to get back to liking that particular boyfriend of my mom’s.
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