The other day, as we were riding home from the tennis courts, we crossed paths with two different neighbors who themselves had just crossed paths with each other. I was excited for this, as I'd been looking forward to introducing this one neighbor's daughter to mine for some time. She's a couple years younger than mine, and she's one of the sweetest kids I've ever met. It'd been a while since I'd seen her, and she was almost unrecognizable with her two front teeth missing. So, naturally, the topic of lost teeth came up.
When my daughter lost her first one, at four, it was in the car as we were getting ready to go to her mother's. I sent her mother a text, hey this happened I'm sure she'll be thrilled with a quarter. She was four, with no concept of monetary value. She came home a couple days later telling me she got a five dollar bill. That settled it for me, all lost teeth would be sent there. In the time since, I've heard tell of a twenty being slipped in for one. No way I was engaging in that game.
I made it nearly three years without having to play tooth fairy, but my lucky streak had just ended when she lost a tooth at the very start of a five day stint together. We talked about it. I restated my position on mythical creatures, but also emphasized how it's important to celebrate these milestones of growth. We decided that buying her a set of paint markers on our next Target run was the best way to celebrate this lost tooth. She was due for a new set of something anyhow. Two birds, one happy child of a stone. That afternoon we used her new set of markers to jointly draw a rainbow with grass and flowers and clouds and a blue sky and a sun shining down from the corner of the canvas. It was a great moment for the two of us, some very pleasant bonding.
This was not the story I told as the five of us were standing there on the sidewalk. Instead, I decided to crack jokes about the benefits of co-parenting, how I managed to avoid engaging in tooth fairy inflation, with more than a few allusions to how dysfunctional my ex is. Nothing that would outright violate the clause in my divorce forbidding either of us from speaking poorly of each other in the child's presence, but enough that these two men would know what I meant. At one point, I looked down at her face and could tell that this was not the direction she wanted the conversation to go.
The truth is that there are endless accusations I could throw at my ex over the state of her mental health and its effects on our marriage and on the children (her two older ones from her first marriage and our daughter). Abuse is not an inappropriate word. The truth is also that narcissism is no longer just a clinical condition. It has grown into a cultural force that we all have to contend with.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the universal nature of mythology, how it evolved as an attempt to explain the unexplainable in ways that all people at the time could relate to. I don't think it's completely lost that value, and I don't think it's a coincidence that this condition is named after one such myth. This is not something we should be ashamed of. It has a survival value to it, we have to be concerned with ourselves to a certain degree in order to make it in this world. It can easily get out of hand though, and it requires diligence to protect against going too far.
I think accountability is the antidote to it, the guardrail against losing perspective on life. So the next morning, as we were snuggled up on the couch getting ready to start our day, I brought it up to her. I told her how I recognized the lost opportunity to tell the story of our joint painting, and that it wasn't fair to her for me to make the jokes I did. I apologized for this, and she forgave me. She is a kind and caring child, so this is not surprising.
There are a lot of benefits to co-parenting. There are a lot of things I don't have to deal with, things I can honestly say, "that's something for you and your mother." One of the challenges though, especially without having a committed romantic relationship in my life and especially in a cross-gendered dynamic, is having to simultaneously be a distinct and authoritative figure for her while also using our relationship as the model for healthy adult ones. I think I'm doing a good job at this.