Here’s to All the Tooth Fairies: Lessons of Creativity During Crisis

It all started when we first went into lockdown for “The COVID”.  We were away from home at a little cabin on a lake built by my great grandfather trying to bring some sense of normalcy to the spring break that wasn’t, when my eight-year-old lost a tooth. As is our tradition, she wrote a note to the Tooth Fairy and tucked it under her pillow, and as is tradition (recognizable to many parents I suspect) I was so caught up in current events, I forgot. 

The next morning, faced with a crying daughter clutching the unread note and unfound tooth, what else could I do? I lied. I cooked up a story about how the Tooth Fairy didn’t know we were at the lake house avoiding all human contact… but I reassured her that I would find a way to let her know and it would all work out. 

Enter my friend Alicia aka “Tooth Fairy Hotline”. You see, I had shared my woes on a SLACK channel with some industry friends and before you know it- two of them came to the rescue offering to be the Tooth Fairy. And so it began… the legend of the Tooth Fairy hotline, the place parents text to let the Tooth Fairy know when their kid would be out of town, or moved, or whatever. 

This new friendship has continued in the sweetest fashion, with an adorable series of text exchanges between my daughter and the Tooth Fairy Hotline. These notes seem to always come just when she needs them:

In fact, she made another visit just last night:

So the moral of this story? 

Be gentler with mistakes right now.

I was so angry with myself that I forgot that tooth – that I put my anxieties ahead of tending to my family that night – but that’s just silly. That colleague who turned in a less-than-stellar deliverable this morning? He could be doing just about everything to try and hold it all together right now. Documents can be fixed after we make sure our people are not breaking under all of this.

Don’t be afraid to be inventive, but do it with balance: this isn't a sabbatical.

We are all figuring out the new normal and it’s ok to find work arounds for even the smallest situations. Anyone take a conference call from a closet this week? Anyone feed their kids cake for lunch? Anyone else enlist their friend to become the Tooth Fairy Hotline? (oh…. just me on that one eh?)

Being creative in how we problem solve right now will build up our problem-solving muscle for the future making us twice as resilient if and when wave two hits us in the fall. A lot of boundaries are being pushed right now, giving us a lot more flexibility to try new things – from Telehealth to remote learning. But let's not lose focus on the balance: in words adapted from a FB post from a friend, "You don’t have to learn a second language or write the next great American novel, this is NOT a sabbatical!" This situation is already giving us lots of ways to stretch ourselves, let’s be good with that being enough!

Lean on your network.

As the famous Fred Rogers saying goes, “Look for the helpers.” they are all around us. This time can be an opportunity to create deeper, more meaningful bonds with the people we generally keep only in our "9 to 5 box". We need all the help we can get right now, so it’s ok to ask for 5 extra minutes between Zoom calls to find the crayons for the kids. It’s ok to check in more regularly to make sure your parents are coping. Here is to all the helpers out there right now: the Doctors, the Nurses, the Researchers, the Engineers printing face shields on 3D printers, the Knitting groups who have dusted off their sewing machines to make face masks, the College Students delivering groceries to the elderly, the Gamers crunching through medical data on their overclocked gaming PCs, and to all the friends who step in and step up in ways big and small: here’s to all the Tooth Fairies!