Good confessions are blunt, thus:

I am The Tooth Fairy.

Under that shimmering mantle, I have managed a telepathic parrot, a multitude of ice cream-fueled unicorns, and a dance band staffed by artistic snow monkeys. I have traveled in a globe-spanning zeppelin command center, and built an enchanted castle, the resting place for billions of children’s teeth, not far from the storied headquarters of Mr. Santa Claus. He works but one night a year; I never ceased, owing to my steady and abundant global customer base. Unlike humans, most of the critters I managed were obliging and required minimal oversight. Real estate, though, that’s a hassle even when it’s make-believe. Ask anyone possessing magical wealth. Or take my word for it, in this and all other matters.

Critically, The Tooth Fairy also had a marker pen of sparkly golden ink, which for several years I wielded for my audience of two.

I was not, like some, a Tooth Fairy manqué, casually swapping out a lost tooth for the usual quarter and calling it a night. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: The kid gets up in the morning two bits to the good, everybody is happy. Fine, if fleeting. When my initial son lost his first tooth, though, I yearned for a Tooth Fairy backstory, and some understanding of the consequences for the magical sprite’s peculiar nocturnal fetching.

I began with a simple thank you note, informing him that his lower front tooth was now part of a Castle of Eternal Smiles, a live-in grin of joy, made from the teeth of children the world over. Specifically, it capped a glittering rampart.

Admittedly, a sprawling construction made entirely of teeth sounds rather primal, even a touch grisly, to adult ears. For the most part though, kids possessing gift money are too gleefully ADD to dwell long on such things. Besides, they’ve heard worse - read your Brothers Grimm.

The letter was a big hit the next day, particularly for its loopy golden signature I’d written with a party pen that happened to be next to the keyboard. I signed it as a southpaw to throw off any youthful sleuthing.1 The boy ran around our bed waving his document, his younger sibling in tow with a vision that he too would someday enter this larger pantheon of magical beings.

What I had not counted on was the obvious, that between them there were 39 teeth to go. This presented a significant call on details and plot over the next few years.

With the next tooth, the Tooth Fairy revealed the existence of her magic parrot, who locates every tooth under every child’s pillow every night. [Note to the data-driven: our planet enjoys about 950 million people between the ages of five and 12, who lose on average 2.5 teeth a year, which works out to about one every 146 days; this amounts to 6.5 million teeth a night, or 4,519 teeth a minute. You’re goddamn right that parrot is magical.] His name was Midnight Pinkie, perhaps because he works all night, on a globe where it’s always night someplace. And yet he finds time to keep TTF fully apprised of what’s happening in the lives of two of her favorite kids.

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It then developed that Midnight Pinkie was assisted by a unicorn named Sparkle Bob. One spots, one transports. Then, that Sparkle Bob liked ice cream, and could they leave some out next time? The tooth after that revelation yielded further evidence in support of the myth, for the next proffered ice cream bowl was left empty by their bunk beds. Mirabile dictu!

Another unicorn, Sparkle Keith, showed up to help with the younger boy’s teeth. Another one, Sparkle Norman, worked in the greater Himalaya/Mongolia/Siberia region. The Tooth Fairy also maintained an Enamel Archive, where the history of each tooth and what it had chewed was recorded. There were the musically-inclined snow monkeys. There were skipping turtles, in charge of an Easter Egg hunt at the North Pole. There were many doings with Santa (the firstborn running into our bedroom yelling “The Tooth Fairy knows Santa!” is a cherished morning newsflash.) There was a tour in the command zeppelin to the South Seas. Iceberg races with Royal Ventana, the penguin queen of Antarctica. Snowmen they made with her, and took back to the North Pole. They heard of dances at the Cloud King’s house. They wrote back to her, asking for a ride on Sparkles Bob and Keith.

At the time I was, in my day job as a financial journalist, reading a lot of quarterly reports and shareholder letters. Which may explain why sometimes the Tooth Fairy would begin an update with “Big doings around the kingdom these days…”

As some of you have guessed, the Tooth Fairy drinks. For some reason, children’s teeth seem to come out unexpectedly during dinner. Well I remember draining a second glass of wine as I smiled at my son’s newly gap-toothed grin, and prepared for a second writing shift for the day. Mrs. Hardy would look at me lovingly across the table, mouthing something like, “your move, buster.”2

As everyone slept I was back in our cottage, raveling my shaggy dog mythology from the keyboard, sometimes abetted by a slow third glass, while raccoons padded on the roof above. It was great fun, and always a relief to make my deadline, painstakingly signing my letter in southpaw gold.

In some ways it was some of the most distinctive writing I’ve done. All effective writing has an audience in mind. It answers the question, “who is reading this, and where do I want to take them?” This is true even when the audience is oneself and the destination is “Hopefully, illumination.”

Here and elsewhere, though, one’s children are a special category, if only for the way we know them. Everyone else we know, everyone, comes to us with their history, and so much of any close relationship consists of us trying to explain ourselves to each other. Holding my firstborn, however, I knew the only connection utterly unsullied by time, and therefore possessing a unique purity. Not to mention, all the cleaning, and toting, and sometimes myth-making, thereafter.

Late into the night as TTF, I wrote for them with that connection in mind, and often in anticipation of how overjoyed they would be at the new knowledge. When I wrote for print newspapers, I’d sometimes see people on the subway smiling, even laughing, at something I’d written. That feeling was close, the way a lightning bug is close to lightning itself.

Today I might have AI do the whole thing for me, issuing a few simple prompts and seconds later possessing a far more coherent mythology I could deal out over those years.

Reader, thank Goodness I’m not looking back on how I did the whole thing with AI. Nothing like the same audience relationship.

As I write this, I have another confession. Until now I never revealed my identity to my sons. They simply ran out of teeth, and The Tooth Fairy sailed into the horizon in her airship, accompanied by all her magic friends. One of those children will soon clerk on the Federal Court, while the other manages a team of a dozen AI engineers. Most likely they have moved on to other delusions, more suited to the world of adults. As must we all.

And if by chance they have not - Boys, I made this whole thing up.