How to Stop Believing
When my daughter Q was 7, she had a loose baby tooth succumb to a spoonful of lemon yogurt. As she wrote her note for the Tooth Fairy (asking for both the money and the tooth to be left, please), Q announced: “There are no such things as fairies.” Instead, she asserted that a “Tooth Person” exchanged cash for teeth. “So some person comes into our house. At night. For your teeth?” we asked. “Yes,” Q said, and calmly ended the note with her name.
My wife and I were both puzzled and disappointed by this in-between business. Puzzled because Q didn’t seem bothered by the less enchanting and much creepier non-fairy version of the story. Disappointed because myth management is a lot of work, especially when you reside on the other side of the myth, and we were ready to let the Tooth Fairy go.
Myths are explanations by way of stories, and keeping the explanations satisfying (for yourself or others) means anticipating the entailments and questions. We had prepared for the obvious: Our kids have grown up in apartments, and we knew they would wonder, after all the traditional seasonal poems and network-TV specials, how Santa leaves them gifts in the night without a chimney to slide down and back up. (“The night doorman knows that he’s coming and let’s him in,” we said.) Other questions, obvious now, caught us off guard, such as when they asked a few years ago: “What does the Tooth Fairy do with all those teeth?” We struggled mightily with this question, and I’ve become convinced that it has no non-horrifying answer.
I was fine with telling Q and our son M the truth about these things outright and offering them a competing explanation about parents giving deserved rewards and encouraging wonder and stuff like that. My wife, to her credit and wisdom, insisted that our kids come to these truths on their own. She believes that the various fairies and magic bunnies and nocturnal elves greatest gift is the opportunity to discover their nonexistence.
This discovery is inevitable anyway. Beliefs and the stories that bind them constantly pull at each other. Beliefs that don’t square with the stories we tell ourselves tend not to last long; same with stories that don’t square with beliefs we have trouble giving up. Childhood myths survive until competing evidence nags and the desire to know overpowers the desire to believe in their truth or what would allow them to be true. Once doubt arises somewhere (is Santa really fast enough to deliver presents to the whole world in a single night?), a little thinking can quickly unravel the entire myth.
I figured the Tooth Fairy would be the first myth knocked loose for the kids since that fairy’s existence and purpose leads to more questions than answers pretty much right away (e.g., the use of teeth question above). But, for them, the Easter Bunny was the first casualty. Its retirement proceeded as many belief revisions do, through a combination of salient empirical evidence and the compulsion to adjust the story to make sense of that evidence. The night before Q’s seventh Easter Sunday, my wife and I were in our bedroom filling plastic eggs with jelly beans and comically small Milky Ways, as we have done every kid year, when Q came in saying her room was too hot. My wife quickly and suspiciously sprang up and threw a blanket over the eggs on the bed, which caused them to bounce and rattle. I took Q quickly back to her room to turn on the fan while trying not to look or sound like I had a mouth full of candy.
Once convinced that Q had gone back to sleep, we finished filling and hiding the eggs in our tiny living room, and we set out the larger sweets in their wicker baskets fat with plastic grass. A little later, my wife decided we had too much candy left in the bag, and she went back to fill the eggs further. One jelly bean dropped in the dark.
Q spotted it right away in the morning. She put on that look of hers, the one where she narrows her eyes and smiles, the word ‘clever’ written in the cursive of her lips.
“I see the Easter Bunny forgot one,” she said. Paused. “What were you two doing last night in your room with all those eggs?”
“What do you think we were doing?” her mother asked back. Lots of pausing. “Who do you think is the Easter Bunny?”
She didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure, caught between believing and not believing, between wanting to know and wanting to not know, as the story began to rewrite itself.
We spent the rest of the day pretending noticeably to each other that the Easter Bunny exists, mainly via a running joke about it saving money on fun-size candy with its Walgreens rewards card.
Later that night, when Q and I were alone as her bath ran, she asked, “Are you really the Easter Bunny?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.” I could see that she did.
“Yep, we are.” She nodded. Was quiet. “Are you disappointed?”
“No.” Paused. “Not really.”
“Well,” I said, paused. “At least you know that no giant rabbit comes into our house at night while we sleep.”
Q said no more about it. She slipped into the bath and unfolded herself under the water, touching her toes on the tap, her head now almost against the opposite end. She looked big, bigger.
We never hid eggs again after that year. The Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Santa, they’ve all been retired now, lost to the kids' growing experience of being in this practical world. Magic has become a trick. But the need for myth, for sense and purpose, never goes away, and that need doesn't get easier to satisfy. Without Santa or the Tooth Fair (and even with my wife and I still around), they have to take on more of the burden to determine whether they've been good all year and which bits of themselves have value, cash or otherwise. How many beliefs will they find themselves invested in over the course of their lives — about politics, religion, culture, family — only to have them dislodged and replaced? M and Q, like each of us, will always have to reckon with the collision of what they believe to be true about themselves and the truth of who they prove to be.
That’s the real lesson of believing: You never really stop; you just find yourself believing something else.