![]() It’s Puck sweeping the dust with a broom behind the door. It’s what glows between a mother and her child. Who is she? The fairy is the space between knowing and not knowing. The fairy flits back and forth, uncatchable. They continue to exist because they believe, like a child, that they exist. Some believe fairies are the discarded gods of the oldest faiths. Their limbs grow longer and longer like shadows.įor whom is a child’s childhood? I think it’s for all of us. They are losing their baby teeth at what seems an alarming rate. And then one day, out of nowhere, they won’t anymore. They smell like poppies, warm earth, milk. It’s the child who is enchanted, a metaphor, a shape-shifter. We ask the child to keep the awe we forgot how to hold. ![]() To believe in what we believe in no longer. We ask the child to drag around the unwieldy weight of magic. We take shelter in children to escape oblivion. The closest I’ve ever come was once as a child-in a dream-I ran after myself, and when I caught up to me and turned around I wasn’t there. I’ve never looked up and seen a faint green glow. In this language I would draw a map that clearly marks where my sons’ wonder is buried so they always know where to go on their coldest days.Ĭlap your hands don’t let mother die. I want to turn them into an alphabet just for us. What I want is my sons’ illegible, lyrical teeth. “Magic anyone? Endless fun? Astounding joy?” “No,” say my sons, “we’re good.” And they are. Often as a mother I am in a cold sweat juggling whimsy and delight. Tink, whose name sounds like a wish that won’t come true. Tink, whose name sounds like a penny tossed in a glass. She flashes “more merry and impudent than ever.” It doesn’t even occur to her to thank the children who believed. Many children clapped, some didn’t, “a few little beasts hissed.” Tink, of course, is saved. ![]() But I can’t locate exactly what it ever lit up.Īfter Tinker Bell drinks the poison Hook left for Peter Pan, and her wings can barely carry her, and her light starts fading, and after she lets Peter Pan’s tears run over her finger, she realizes “she can get well again if children believed in fairies.” “Clap your hands don’t let Tink die,” says Peter Pan. It’s a cartoon about a sea sponge who lives with his meowing pet snail.Ī little light goes out inside me. Noah looks at me again with a mix of sadness and pity and suspicion. I used my imagination, and now I’ve been caught. I think about all the elaborate notes in pink cursive, the one hundred shiny pennies in a cloth pouch, the blue stuffed cat, the five-dollar bill, the Superman, the glitter trails, the wooden hearts, the breath I held, the way I ever so gently lifted the pillow, the sparkle-stamped envelope with the tooth fairy’s address: 12345 Tooth Fairy Lane, Moutharctica, Earth. He pats my hand and takes a bite of broccoli. “Sorry, Mama,” says Eli, my six-year-old. The thing about not existing is that sometimes it’s a lot like being a mother. A small, dry wing falls from my back and lands on the floor like a candy wrapper. Without blinking, he looks back up at the screen. “I know you’re the tooth fairy.” Noah, my eight-year-old, looks me dead in the eye. Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.
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