The Day My Nanny Killed The Tooth Fairy
I walked into the house yesterday evening to find our nanny seated at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper, as my daughter streaked around half naked, chanting a song about the 50 states.
This scene didn’t faze me; L, who’s been with us for close to ten years, had a long day and needed time to chill. Sabrina was being her usual 7-year-old self. It’s what happened next that shocked me.
“Mommy!” Sabrina said. “You’re the tooth fairy!”
WHA?!!!
“And why do you think that?” I asked, innocently.
“L told me!” she said.
Ooof. If she’d said that our sitter had just made her a mojito, I couldn’t have been more shocked.
“Is it true?” Sabrina asked.
“Well, yeah, I gave you money when your last tooth fell out,” I admitted, hoping things would end there.
“No, you gave me money all the times!” Sabrina said, triumphantly.
I glanced at L, surprised by the mix of disappointment and fury I felt.
“L, I would have liked to have been the one to tell her,” I said, quietly.
“She started asking me and pressing me on it,” L responded.
“I’m sure she did,” I said, “but I would have liked to tell her.”
“Mommy!” Sabrina said. “Can I get more money? I don’t think three dollars is enough.”
Mommy the Tooth Fairy wasn’t up for negotiating, and I also didn’t want to keep discussing the issue in front of Sabrina, so I said we’d talk another time. Soon after, L left for the day.
I have been mostly hands-off with L over the years. Mostly, I’ve felt gratitude to her for faithfully looking after our kids while my husband and I are at work and making sure they are well fed, clean, entertained and generally taken care of. I have a son with special needs, and L has been exceptionally wonderful with him. Once, I entered her in a Best Nanny contest on a caregiver site and she won.
But last night, I stewed. I thought L had overstepped her bounds. I felt gypped, and lucky that we didn’t celebrate Christmas or Easter, because then I would have had to contend with potential Santa Claus and Easter Bunny outings, too.
Just the other day, Sabrina was a believer. When I dropped her tooth down the drain as I rinsed off dried blood, she made me write a note that said, “Dear Tooth Fairy, I accidentally dropped Sabrina’s tooth down the sink drain. Could you please still leave her money. Thank you.” Then Sabrina slipped it under her pillow. In the morning, she ran into my room yelling “MOMMY! The Tooth Fairy came!”
I always carefully weigh what I do and don’t bring up with L about things that upset me. It’s inevitably biggie stuff, like the fact that she was babying my son and needed to give him more independence, that I air.
Did ratting me out as The Tooth Fairy truly count as a major issue? Yes, I decided, it did. I’m the mom, I thought. I’M. THE. MOM. How dare L decide to tell Sabrina. There are only a few precious, innocent years in a child’s life when Tooth Fairies are real. But now, no more. The thrill was over for Sabrina and for me, too—I’ve always adored how giddy she got about the whole Tooth Fairy ritual.
Even my husband, usually a human marshmallow, was unnerved. “I’m going to talk with L if you don’t,” he said.
In the morning, after Sabrina left for school and while my son was in the playroom, I approached L. “I want to talk about The Tooth Fairy thing,” I said. “Honestly, I didn’t think it was your place to tell Sabrina it was me.”
L explained how it had gone down. They’d been talking about teeth Sabrina had lost, and Sabrina asked if L’s daughter ever got bucks from The Tooth Fairy. No, L explained, she didn’t—in her family, they didn’t believe in the Tooth Fairy. Sabrina pondered this, then pressed her on who exactly this fairy was. “You’ll need to talk about that with your mother,” L said. And that’s when Sabrina made the connection and realized that it was me.
Now I better understood that L hadn’t really outed me. And while I was still disappointed, I realized my reaction had been over the top. If I was being honest with myself, it had less to do with L crossing a line and more to do with my issues about being a working mom. I hadn’t been there when my little girl’s tooth fell out—L was. I wasn’t the one who’d been doing the bulk of the kids’ homework in recent months—L was. I wasn’t the one who baked brownies for Sabrina’s last Girl Scout troop meeting—L was.
There’s been a whole lot of talk about The Mommy Wars in recent years but you rarely hear about The Nanny Wars, this tension that bubbles up between moms and the people we trust to help bring up our kids. I want my sitter to be alterna-mom. I don’t want my sitter to be alterna-mom because I’m the mom. I want my sitter to feel empowered to do what’s right for my children. I don’t want her to feel too empowered. I want her to be in control. I don’t want her to assume that much control. I desperately need her. I wish I didn’t need her.
It’s probably the most complicated relationship in my life.
I told L that I hope she understood my reaction, and she said she did. We joked about how hard it is to put one over Sabrina. I’m still kind of bummed, but I take consolation in the fact that my girl still believes in magic tricks, Katie Kazoo’s power to morph into other people, that my hair is its natural color, and that the world is generally an amazing place where anything can happen.
Photo source: Flickr/edenpictures
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Somebody told me that Santa Claus wasn’t real and I was only 9 or 10.
I’m sorry but I’d still be very upset. There was no need to tell your daughter that they didn’t believe in the tooth fairy. She simply could have said something else like we keep our teeth or something like that. I understand your frustration by not being the one there but that doesn’t give her the right to take any of your family’s traditions from you be it accidentally or not. Kids are young for such a short time and she should realize that as a caregiver. She should help you maintain their innocence and respect your “beliefs”. I’m sorry but that would be pretty unforgivable in my book.
You know, letting go of something special like the Tooth Fairy is hard even if it does go down more like you hope it will. My daughter figured it out on her own last year when she put a tooth under her pillow without telling me to test what would happen, and of course the tooth was still there in the morning. She finally told me, with tears in her eyes, that she thought I must be the Tooth Fairy, and I confessed I was. I told her it was fun thing to get to be the Tooth Fairy and I hoped she would get to do that with her own kids one day. But it was all kind of heartbreaking. Because it’s really about growing up. And that always comes too soon.
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http://the-quiet-corner.blogspot.com/
As a nanny, I was always super sensitive about boundaries and the parents feelings. I always made it a point to NEVER tell a mom about a child’s “Firsts” if it happend with me b/c I wanted the parents to believe that they didn’t miss out on it just b/c they were working. As far as the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa, I made sure to ask the parents what I should say in case the subject of whether or not they were real came up beforehand so the child/ren in my care got the same story that their parents gave them. “L” should have tried to convince the child otherwise or at least texted/called the mom before she came home to give her a heads up on the situation. I don’t blame the parents for being upset. Kids grow up so fast these days and every time they learn the “truth” about such things, a part of thier childhood ends.
I know this wasn’t really the point of your post, but there is a really great book called Throw Your Tooth on the Roof, which is about all the different cultural traditions related to the losing of baby teeth. I thought it was fascinating, oh yeah, and my kids liked the book too.
Tooner, what? Santa isn’t real?!
Adrienne, I am still thinking about the incident, but really, I very much like our nanny overall and I think she knows how I feel about this sort of thing going forward. There really isn’t more I could do about this.
Korinthia, your comment was really reassuring. Thanks for that reality check.
Sanriobaby, sounds like you were an awesome nanny. It’s very true about a part of childhood ending, but she is still very kid-like in many ways and I am going to hold onto that.
And Anna, that book is TOTALLY relevant, now that the Tooth Fairy is out of the closet. I am off to look it up on Amazon, thank you!
I can see your point. I also have a nanny – but the child is 7 years old! That’s pretty much at the outer limit of tooth fairy time. And the little girl mostly figured it out herself. Which tells you right there that it was time she knew.
http://guajolotitos.blogspot.com
Maybe you should consider raising your own chld, if you want to parent her.
If you don’t concoct lies to your children in the beginning its easier when you don’t have to come up with an alibi when they get older and press you for “just the facts ma’am”. I never played the tooth fairy game with my daughter. Nor Santa Claus or Easter. Life is a lot easier that way. I still wish my mother would have been straight up about fluffy “going off to the farm”. I was pretty darn confused when I found it flattened in the road a few days later. We think we’re “protecting” our kids. They don’t like lies anymore than we do as adults.
Kids grow up unfortunately you won’t always be there to see it happen. I’m still debating whether or not to let my child believe in them while I think it’s cute I don’t think we should lie to them. How will I tell him not to lie when I told him a lie for 3-5 yrs seems kind of wrong to me.
I don’t think the nanny made a mistake, she did the right thing by telling Sabrina to ask her mom. And it was her who put two and two together, so that tells you that she’s a bright kid. I was told around that same age that The Three Kings didn’t bring us presents, that my mom was the one who bought them. I was devastated. Not because I was told a lie, but rather because the fantasy ended. I was happier thinking that someone I didn’t know travelled from very far to bring me presents just because I had been a good kid all year long. I hated the kid who told my siblings and I the truth. That year I was given money to buy my own presents and I cried and began saving money. I don’t have any children yet but I do have a niece who had the most wonderful Christmas ever last year when she saw all the presents that Santa brought her. The time will come and she’ll learn the truth but I’m sure she’ll remember all her life how happy she felt when she believed in Santa Claus.
At seven years old, she may have already had classmates that have made comments about the lack of tooth fairy. My charge in kindergarten came home this year speaking about how some kids said there was no Easter Bunny. I said nothing as she didn’t ask me to confirm or deny it. Although I was the one playing EB this year while they were on vacation and came back to the hidden eggs only to have this kids tell me EB hid them harder this year than in previous ones.We live in a multi cultural community full of different religions and traditions and my charges are learning about things all the time that they don’t celebrate or do. I don’t feel the nanny did anything directly wrong by saying the truth if she had also spoke about it in context to world traditions. Which is something my charge’s dentist did with them last fall. He came from a different culture and shared what the story of the Rat who takes teeth… The girls thought it was cool, which prompted us to look up different teeth tradtions in the world.
I’m with Lauren on this one, you tell your kids not to lie because its bad and you turn around and lie to them, i dont get it, there will be no easter bunny, santa clause or tooth fairy in my house
I thought this was an interesting article overall, but I wanted to point out that you used the racist term “gypped” in the paragraph that begins, “Last night, I stewed.” Maybe you didn’t realize the term originated from a negative stereotype about gypsies. Given your commitment to eradicating hate speech with regard to special needs, I figured you’d want to change the offensive wording here.