On childhood, wonder, and the questions that change everything
For the last couple of weeks, Caleb has been asking Alexa if Santa is real.
Not once.
Repeatedly.
He says he is trying to figure it out.
This is, of course, an extremely Caleb way to approach the situation. He is eleven years old, one of the smartest people I know, and apparently childhood magic has now become a research project.
Alexa has not been particularly helpful.
“Well, someone has been eating all my cookies,” she says.
Caleb remains unconvinced... and unamused.
There is something funny about watching an eleven-year-old interrogate a smart speaker about Santa Claus. There is also something about it that makes my chest hurt a little.
Holden lost another tooth last week.
He told me he did not think the Tooth Fairy was real.
That one got me too.
Not because I desperately want them to keep believing forever. I know how this works. They are supposed to grow up. They are supposed to question things. Eventually Santa becomes a story, the Tooth Fairy becomes a family tradition everyone understands, and Christmas morning becomes exciting for different reasons.
That is all normal.
Still.
I remember when none of it required investigation. There were Santa dinners. There were letters. And there was magic.
Years ago, Caleb lost a tooth while we were out on a walk and could not find it. So he wrote the Tooth Fairy a note explaining the situation. There was no suspicion involved. No attempt to gather evidence. He had lost the tooth. The Tooth Fairy needed to know why it would not be under his pillow. Obviously, documentation was required.
There was a time when Caleb believed in Santa without wondering. A time when a lost tooth still required a carefully written explanation to the Tooth Fairy. A time when magic did not need evidence because believing was enough.
I do not know exactly when that started to change.
I only know that now Caleb is asking Alexa for answers, and Holden is beginning to question the fairy who once needed no explanation at all.
I do not want to go back and start childhood over. I like who they are now. I like eleven-year-old Caleb, with his questions and his sharp mind and his need to understand how things work. I like eight-year-old Holden, funny and loud and increasingly skeptical in his own way.
There are wonderful things about these ages. They can do more for themselves. We can have better conversations. They have stronger opinions, stranger jokes, bigger interests, and whole parts of themselves that exist outside of me. I love watching that happen.
That is what makes this ache a little harder to explain. Because I am not mourning who they are now.
I am mourning something that used to exist around them.
The certainty. The anticipation. The absolute willingness to believe in something simply because childhood had told them it was true.
There is something bittersweet about watching wonder turn into understanding.
They gain the answer.
They lose the magic.
And I know that is part of growing up, too. There is no tragedy in an eleven-year-old questioning Santa. There is no crisis in an eight-year-old deciding the Tooth Fairy probably is not real. If anything, it is evidence that they are learning how the world works.
But sometimes I miss the years when the world worked a little differently.
The years when a letter could solve the problem of a missing tooth. The years when Santa dinners felt enormous. The years when Christmas Eve carried a kind of electricity that had nothing to do with batteries, shipping notifications, or figuring anything out.
The years when magic did not need defending.
It was simply there.
Maybe that is what I miss most.
Not the diapers, not the bottles, not the exhausting parts of having very little children. I do not want to start over.
I just miss that particular kind of wonder.
The kind that belongs so completely to childhood that you do not realize how rare it is until you are watching it begin to fade.
And once you notice it beginning to leave, it is hard not to look back at all the moments it still came so easily.
The years when they stared out the window, searching the sky for Santa. The nights when they scattered reindeer food out in the snow, completely certain it would be found. The mornings Holden woke up and could have sworn he heard Santa, up there on the roof. The days nobody stopped to wonder whether any of it was true.
It just was.
Looking back now, I can see how extraordinary all of it had been.
For a while, they didn't have to choose to believe in magic.
They simply lived inside out.
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