Posts Tagged kids

Last night, my eldest daughter lost another tooth.  I guess lost is kind of the wrong word for it.  It’s not like it came out by accident and then tumbled into a drain pipe.  It was ripped from her tender mouth by her sadistic daddy.  She knew it had to come out. She knew she wanted it to come out. But she also knew that it was going to hurt a bit and, if our experience the last 5 times she lost a tooth was to be repeated, there would be blood. Well… It did eventually come out and yes, she was right, there was blood and pain and a bit of dark comedy as I, the daddy, gently coerced her into letting me rip the tiny, beautiful tooth from her small tender mouth.

“No, no, wait.  Honey, just a second.  No, no, bring your mouth here.  Okay, I’m not going to pull this time.  I promise.  No, no, I’m just checking.  I just want to see how loose it is.  No, I’m not going to pull it, I’m just going to…  Oops…”

I was very proud of her when it was all said and done.  I’m not sure the feeling was mutual.  Regardless, as I was tucking the tooth safely in the pillow for the tooth fairy, and tucking her into bed, she asked me a simple question.  “Daddy”, she said.  “Can you please promise me that the tooth fairy is real?”  Clever right?  Throwing that ‘Promise’ word in there like that.

You see the problem for me with this question, is that as she is beginning to probe the existence of the tooth fairy (and Santa Clause of course, but not the Easter Bunny, for some reason nobody really believes in the Easter Bunny.  Poor fellow) but while she is beginning to find cracks in the armour of her childhood dreams, I myself am in the midst of my own full on existential crisis.

My whole life, from my birth into the arms of an evangelical minister to my short time as a minister myself through my fall from grace to almost the present day, I have believed in God.  And I’m not talking about casual belief, I mean absolute and stalwart personal confidence in the existence of God.  I haven’t always lived like it and I haven’t always felt it, but I’ve always believed it.  And not just any God, but the protestant, evangelical God of the Bible.  Yah, that one.

But something funny happened to me on the way to March 2009 (a story for another time) and my belief, my faith, my confident and calming certainty in the existence of a personal, involved, directing and divine Creator is no longer alive and well with my soul.  Something in me won’t yet completely let go of 35 years of trust, training and indoctrination, but I’ve all but lost ‘The Way ™’ in favour of that which can not be named.  That which at times feels like liberation from slavery and at other times like sin and death.  Like it or not though, accept it or not, it is the new me.  It’s who I am and who I am becoming.  It’s scary and it’s real.  It’s bloody and it’s liberating.

So back to the tooth fairy.  My daughter will soon discover that the safe little world she lives in, a place where the fairies and elves and magic that make all the problems go away, might not exist.  Worse yet, her dad, the one she thinks she can trust absolutely, was the one who lied to her.  Her simple, clever question was about more than the tooth fairy, but about her ability to trust me.  Her ability and need to trust me.  To trust someone.  “please promise me”, she asked.  As if to say, I know you won’t lie if you promise.  I need to know.

I guess that’s my question now too.  Except for me, I don’t think I have anyone left to ask.