Trusting The Tooth Fairy
“Did you get a letter from the tooth fairy?” I ask a six year-old client. The last time I saw her, she had lost a tooth, and was anticipating her upcoming correspondence with this exciting personage.
“Yes, I asked her what she wears,” she replies. “Her clothes are made of flowers!”
When I was a child, my parents believed that my siblings and I were too intelligent to believe in fairy tales. But looking back, I can see that the superiority I was able to feel over my gullible peers was a poor exchange for the magic I missed.
I have grown to feel that developing relationships with these invisible helpers, benefactors, and guides is an important step in our development. When children bond with tooth fairies and other imaginary beings, they are building a foundation for a trust in that which can be seen. And trust in the invisible is a good strategy for life.
Even as adults, we all need to trust something, someone, somewhere. To live without trust is to live without joy.
But when we trust only that which can be compassed by our own minds, we eventually find ourselves in despair, because life inevitably presents us with things that are beyond our understanding and control. To put all of our trust in other people leads to disappointment, even betrayal, because other people do not infallibly come up to our expectations, no matter how much we love and admire them. To put our trust only in abstractions – rules and codes – makes it difficult for us to tolerate the imperfections of actual people. And objects are as breakable as the trust we place in them.
Trusting in the invisible is something that human beings have done since the dawn of history. It gives us a kind of existential flexibility. It allows us cut ourselves, and others, some slack. It gives us a kind of emotional, spiritual, and practical resilience.
That there is someone out there who cares for us is something that children need to feel about their parents. But we don’t always have access to our parents, and our parents don’t always care for us in the ways that we need to be cared for. The older we grow, the more we find out that our parents (and later, our relatives, teachers, coaches, friends, lovers, bosses and so on) don’t have all the answers. They don’t even always (sadly) have our best interests at heart.
If we have the ability to reach toward the invisible helper, we tend to be more resilient. And the comfort we experience is real.
Last Sunday, I was talking to a neighbor at the local farmer’s market when he took a call from his wife. “My grandson is in trauma,” he reported. “He just found out that there is no Santa Claus.” A kid on his Little League team had broken the news. When the boy asked his mother, she told him that he was old enough to know the truth. He responded, “But that can’t be true about the Easter Bunny!”
My neighbor wasn’t sympathetic. “He’s ten, he needs to grow up!” But his grown daughter, sitting next to him, clearly had a different perspective. When her father asked her what she would have said, she replied, “I would have asked him, ‘What do you think?’”
It turns out that she grew up the way I did – her dad saw no point in “deluding” her about these imaginary beings. But she made sure that her own children would see Santa Claus out in the woods beyond their house every winter. “They never seemed to notice that Santa Claus always appeared when Mom was out feeding the animals,” she said. “One time Santa Claus slipped on the ice. They talked about that for years!”
“The next question I’m going to ask the tooth fairy,” reports my young client, “is, ‘How do you write?’ All her letters are green, so I think she writes with her magic wand. And when she wants to erase something, she sprinkles magic dust on it!”
After the session, when I ask for a private word, the face of the girl's mother looks worried. “There’s something you need to know,” I tell her seriously, once I close the door.
“It’s about how the tooth fairy writes her letters . . .”
Comments
Thank you, John, for this wonderful story! I see
several important threads here:
1. that your son approached you with a question that
seems to have grown out of his own processes. He wasn’t
challenged and ripped out of his personal imaginary
world; he was in the process of considering how he
would like to redecorate it.
2. It is important to notice that the question was
phrased in positive way. Your son asked, “Is Santa
Claus imaginary?” He didn’t say, “Is Santa Claus not
real?” As you point out in your math analogy, the life
of the imagination has its own reality - and even the
dignity of mathematical truth.
3. We usually have no idea of what words actually mean
to a five year-old. Whatever Peter understood about the
word “imaginary,” it was probably not exactly the way
an adult would define it. And even you and I, as
adults, probably experience quite different resonances
in the word.
It is nice that, whatever your son meant by “imaginary
person,” it did not seem to interfere with his ability
to enjoy the holiday!
My mother-in-law had painted a very large ceramic piece—Santa kneeling before the manger with baby Jesus. It became the center of my explanation that God sent Jesus to help us all, and Jesus needed Santa to help him at Christmas. We can help Santa. So when the time came, I hadn’t really deceived my daughters with the metaphor—they entered in a different way. Sorry this might not work for all religious traditions, but by analogy, perhaps.
What a delightful, and important, conversation, Eve. I especially appreciate your line, “To live without trust is to live without joy.” Its corollary might be “To live without trust is to live with fear.”
Counselors tell us that fearfulness is one of the most common issues that their counselees have to reconcile. The more we can do to help our children learn to trust - and who to trust - the less they will be relying on counselors later in life.
On our way to see you today, Eve, I was trying to probe Sophie out of her silent funk. She finally confessed that she was thinking about how Atticus had told her that Barney is not real. Interesting!
Thank you so much, everyone, for your stories! Next
post will be a continuation of this question of what is
“real” and what is not - how the brain processes
sensory information - and how we can be divided about
what we think we think and what we are wired to (not)
think.
Meanwhile, keep the thoughts and stories coming!
What struck me was this phrase:
“I can see that the superiority I was able to feel over
my gullible peers was a poor exchange for the magic I
missed.” I had the magic but felt foolish for it
at times when friends expressed this feeling of
superiority, even as adults. I am absolutely
delighted to see someone write about the plus side of
the “magic”. I go for the magic at school, with
my kids, with my grandkids, etc. It creates a
sense of wonder about all of life that is definitely a
source of joy. Thanks for the boost, Eve - and
for more reasons for continuing on the magic path.
Thank YOU, Julie, for keeping the magic alive!
John Van Ness Jun 30, 2012
When our oldest son, Peter, was about 5 yrs old, he asked one Christmas, “Is Santa Clause an imaginary person?” we answered, “yes”, wondering whether this would shatter his fantasy. But he simply replied, “I thought so” and completely satisfied.
He has been interested in math all his life, and now, in his 50s, he knows the meaning and value of both real and imaginary numbers.