It’s not that getting pregnant transforms you instantly into someone who thinks it’s reasonable to have a stash of tiny teeth in her jewelry box.
You still remember how you felt, as a teenager, when you found a brittle yellowed envelope with your name on it in your father’s filing cabinet. It rattled when you picked it up, and when you opened the flap (it was just folded over, not licked and sealed as if to mail, which was worse somehow) your stomach lurched with equal parts disgust and scorn—disgust at the sight of the teeth themselves, with their strange red spots and jagged irregular holes where the roots should have been—and scorn for your father’s sentimentality, on display yet again.
What were you going to do with them, Dad? Make some kind of creepy necklace?
And he smiled tolerantly and chuckled a little at your snide joke, because he thought his kids’ jokes were funny even when he was the butt of them.
You still remember the person you were as a teenager. You still are the person you were as a teenager—just gentler, and more tired, and less funny, and a significantly better cook.
It’s just that as you reach beneath your sleeping five-year-old’s head—you always wondered, as a kid, how you slept through the tooth fairy’s visit, but he’s not even close to waking up, utterly limp and wheezing ever-so-slightly through his stubbornly stuffy nose—as you reach beneath his pillow you are hit with a sudden flash of memory.
It’s the morning after a restless night, four and a half years ago. The midsummer sun slants early though the window, rousing the fussy infant bundled in the curve of your arm, and for a moment he smiles wide, transfixed by the dust motes dancing above him. Then he grizzles and whines again and you sleepily nudge a knuckle between his lips, hoping to soothe him back to sleep for a few minutes. But there’s a new sharp corner on the familiar lumpy contour of his gums, an intruder in the warm wet maw he presses so eagerly and indiscriminately on every shoulder and nose and bicycle tire he encounters.
The first tooth to come in is the first to fall out, you remember. You think about how he was born with each tooth already formed beneath the surface of his gums, crafted somehow in the invisible red maelstrom of your womb, without your awareness or control, according to some ancient law you never decided to obey. And all this despite your reluctance, your frequent ill humor, your stubborn and ill-founded conviction you could not fit neatly into the mold of “mother.”
And you can’t help but think, Maybe it’d be sweet tucked inside a locket. And even though you know that is objectively insane, even though your inner teenager is rolling her eyes in furious disbelief, you tuck it inside your jewelry box just for now, just until you think of a better place to keep it.