The Long Goodbye
Giving up a pacifier can be a struggle and a triumph - for the whole family
By Elizabeth Graver
My daughter Chloe is 2 ½, sitting solemnly in a cavernous, elevated dentist's chair. "Open, pal," the dentist says. She opens. "Close," he says. Her mouth clamps shut.
At the end of the visit, we are given gifts - a page of rainbow stickers and a glittery toothbrush with the dentist's name printed on it - and a piece of unsettling news: She needs to give up her pacifier. Chloe, says the dentist, has a significant cross bite. The pacifier is making it worse.
Back at home, I search online and find, in addition to a dizzying array of conflicting opinions about pacifier use, a little story. "My name is Mampi," the tale begins. "I am a pacifier. I am your Pacifier, and I am very happy to be yours. You have a Mummy. I also have a Mummy. My Mummy is the Pacifier Fairy, and I love her very much…."
In the story, Mampi's child-host waits for a full moon and then leaves Mampi on the windowsill so that the Pacifier Fairy can come in the night and take Mampi home to Pacifierland. The text is located, ironically, on the official website for Mam, the Austrian company that makes the brand of pacifier we happen to use, and as I read it, I feel a bit like I'm reading a cigarette ad with a boxed announcement saying that smoking is harmful to your health. Still, the story is charming, and at bedtime, I read it to Chloe, expecting this to be a mere introduction. We must ease in, after all. We must wait for a full moon. But as soon as I finish, Chloe says she is ready. "Really?" I ask. "Tonight?"
"Yes."
She leaves the "fifi" (as it has been dubbed in our house) on the windowsill; she does not say goodbye. As she sleeps, mouth open, hands clutching her stuffed lion, I sneak in and leave a note from the Fifi Fairy, and a gift. In the morning, Chloe wakes to the note, and to a shimmery pink dress-up skirt rimmed with fake white fur.
And that, for her, is the end of the fifi, despite the fact that our house is still full of pacifiers. Her little sister, Sylvie, only a few months old, has a fine collection of her own in a bouquet of different colors. She's a colicky infant; the pacifiers comfort her. Just for a few more months, I tell myself.
Except somehow, we forget. Somehow, it doesn't seem relevant; she has, after all, at 9 months old, exactly zero teeth. And then - whoops - she's nearly 2 ½, still "fifying", though only at night and on long car trips. Chloe, now 4 ½, has a lisp and is under strict instructions from a speech therapist to give up sippy cups and do jaw exercises. While no one will ever say for sure that these problems were caused by her former pacifier habit, no one will ever say for sure that they were not. "What about our younger daughter?" I ask the speech therapist.
"Have her give it up now."
"But she just moved out of her crib into a regular bed. Isn't that a lot of transition..."
"Have her give it up."
Detaching from Fifi
From the start, I suspect it won't be so easy this time. Chloe has always been in a great hurry to grow up, while Sylvie likes to lie on a blanket on the floor, wave her arms and legs, and say, in a soft, frail voice, "I'm a newborn, swaddle me." I go online, print the story out again, noticing this time that it has been poorly translated from German, is full of grammatical errors, and feels, somehow, neither quite as charming nor quite as useful as it did before.
Still, I read Sylvie the story before bed, and on the first night, she sets her fifi on the windowsill. "I'm ready!" she sings out, turning away. We all watch — her father, her sister, and I — and for a moment, I almost believe that this story carries miraculous properties. Then she turns back, grabs her fifi, pops it in her mouth again. "Actually, not quite."
The next night, we try again. "Do you want to tell your fifi to have a good journey?" She trots to the windowsill in her robot pajamas and sets down the fifi. "Have a good journey," she says, stroking it. "I'm ready," she tells me. Then she grabs it back and laughs. "Actually, not quite!"
On the fourth night of what is beginning to feel like an over-rehearsed play, she eventually decides to leave her fifi farther afield, depositing it on the windowsill in our bedroom instead of on the one in her own room. By then, it's 10 p.m.; we've been circling for more than an hour. Jim and I get in bed and start to read, though the air feels tense with waiting. Fifteen whole minutes pass before she appears, snatches the pacifier back, sticks it in her mouth, smiles broadly through its scrim, and trots back to her room.
"What do you think the fairy will bring you when you give up your fifi?" I ask her the next morning.
She doesn't hesitate: "A balloon."
Later, without my bringing up the subject, Sylvie announces that she is ready.
"Really?" I ask. "Are you sure?"
"Tonight," Sylvie insists. "I'm ready."
"Okay," I say, trying to sound as if I believe her. "That's great."
I e-mail Jim. When he gets home, he sneaks in a shiny Mylar balloon, printed with Tigger and a message: Hope You Bounce Back Soon. We hide it with a note I've written from the Fifi Fairy. We are ready.
"I'm ready."
"That's great."
"Actually, not quite."
In the girls' room, the windows are etched with frost, and the moon is nearly full. I take Sylvie over to the window. She looks out. "It's sparkly," she says, and then, suddenly, "I see her! I see the Fifi Fairy!"
Chloe runs to the window. "Where?"
"I see her!" says Sylvie.
"Is she coming?" Jim asks.
"Yes!" says Sylvie.
Actually, not quite.
For three more nights, the balloon remains hidden, until eventually it starts to sag a little. At breakfast, a week into all this, Sylvie informs me that she thinks the Fifi Fairy will bring her a balloon and some babies. On my way home from work, I stop at CVS and pick up a packet of three tiny plastic dolls having a tiny plastic birthday party. I wrap the gift and hide it with the note under my bed.
"Are you ready, Sylvie?" I ask that night at bedtime. She pauses. Her forehead furrows; her thick eyebrows draw close. "Yes."
"You can do it!" calls Chloe from across the room where Jim is reading her a story.
"You can do it," her father says.
Fifi's final journey
Now, as before, Sylvie puts the pacifier on the windowsill and takes it back again, but this time, the joy seems gone from the repetition; she looks tired, almost worn. As I watch, I'm hit with the painful feeling of being stuck, teetering, desperate to cross over but unable to make the leap.
I am a little girl trying to jump over the horse in gym class. I want to do it; I balk. I want, I can't, I want. Each time, I take a deep breath and run toward the scarred leather horse; each time, at the very last instant, I lose my nerve and veer away. I suddenly have a strong sense that this is the moment to push — yank the loose tooth out, vault the girl over the horse.
Sylvie puts her fifi on the windowsill beside her bed, takes it off, puts it on, takes it off. I suggest that she try another windowsill. "You come," she commands, and as I follow, she goes to the guest room and leaves the pacifier by the window there. This time, when she tries to take it off, I do not let her.
"No," I say. "You're ready. You told me you were, remember? You're ready. You actually are! You can do it."
Before she can protest, I scoop her up, take her to her bed, and lie with her in my arms, nearly pinning her down.
"I want my fifi."
"I know you do, but it's going back to its mommy tonight, and the Fifi Fairy will be so proud of you and maybe even leave you presents, and you can..."
"I want my fifi."
"I wonder what the fairy will leave."
"A balloon." She writhes. "I need my fifi."
I pull her close. "Go to sleep, Sylvia, and when you wake up, you can see what the fairy has left."
And so, brave girl — torn and stubborn, funny and hardworking girl — she tries to sleep, and I try to sleep, lying next to her for much of the night, waking when she wakes, feeling her grope, watching her empty mouth suckle the air, closing my hand around her hand. And through it all, our sleep-soaked, rising words: "I want my fifi.", "I think the fairy took it already.", "I want it.", "Shhh, you'll wake up Chloe.", "Get me my fifi.", "Shhh." And my arms around her, and her arms around me, and our fitful sleep.
At 6:30 a.m., she's up, running into the hall, crying for her fifi. But there! The balloon, the box containing dolls, the note. She freezes, smiles, grabs her loot, and goes into our bedroom to wake up Jim and show him what she got. I follow, watch her open the dolls and examine the note. Then I stagger to the guest room to sleep for another hour.
When I wake, I return to our room to find Jim and Sylvie still on the bed surrounded by the tiny dolls, the tiny table, the balloon: Hope You Bounce Back Soon. He is reading the note to her. He has read it, he says, at least 50 times. "Again," she says. "Read it again."
"Dear Sylvie," he reads. "Thank you so much for letting your fifi go back to its mommy. I am so proud of you. You are a nice and wonderful girl. Here are some presents for giving up your fifi. Love, the Fifi Fairy."
The next night is fine. I mean really, truly fine. She goes to bed without her fifi; she naps without it, too. She does not ask for it, and she sleeps a good, long time. We tape the note from the fairy by her bed.
Still, there is a residual sadness; she has not forgotten. A day or two later, when she talks to her grandparents on the phone, she can only say, over and over, in a kind of mournful stutter, "Fifi's gone, fifi's gone, fifi's gone." A sadness, still, but even more, she is proud — of her balloon, of her dolls, of her note, of herself. And two days after giving up her pacifier, she pees on her potty for the first time.
Meanwhile, I have been sneaking around the house, finding pacifiers everywhere - under our bed, in the basket by the changing table, caked with dust behind the couch. Each time I locate one, I cut off its nipple and bury it deep in the trash - as much for us as for Sylvie. She has worked very hard on this, and none of us — not I, not Jim, not our babysitter — can go back.
One morning as I drive to work, I reach into the pocket of my parka and find a pacifier there, and without stopping to think, I pop it in my mouth and suck. Its taste is latexy, unpleasant, but its shape is soothing, and as I suck, I remember back to our two girls, when they used to nurse at my breast - the sound of their fast breaths and quick swallows, their dark heads, their hunger, full, fierce and urgent, and, at the same time, calm, steady, outside of time. And further back: my own mouth, my mother, and the milk she made for me. For a moment, I can almost remember.
When I stop at a light, I tuck the pacifier into my coat pocket, thinking I'll throw it away, but when I get to work, I put it in the back of my desk drawer, behind the paper clips, sticky notes, and pens. There it sits, still, a purple plastic flower, unused, given up, but somehow I am not quite ready to throw the last one out.
Elizabeth Graver is the author of three novels, Unravelling, The Honey Thief, and Awake.
Copyright 2005 PARENTING magazine. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
