I love you, son, but I love it even more that you can’t read yet

Sometimes I question whether I’m actually a good dad, or whether I just play one in my column and on Facebook.

Let’s just say I run a lot of hypotheticals as a way to gauge myself.

Like, what if it were 1883, and my son had been born completely covered in hair? Or with no arms or legs? Or with crab pincers for hands?

Now, keep in mind, it’s 1883 we’re talking about.

Would I have profited from his birth defects by putting him on the road with P.T. Barnum’s menagerie?

The fact that I can sorta see myself doing that makes me question whether I’m actually fit to be a parent in any era.

Let’s move up a century, to 1983.

Cute, sassy, pint-sized black kids are all the rage on TV, and my son is spotted by a Hollywood producer and cast in a sitcom — What’s that, you say, my son isn’t black? Never you mind. Whose hypothetical is this, anyway? — becoming a huge star.

Do I skim a few thousand off his earnings as some sort of biological finder’s fee?

They’re just hypotheticals, I realize, but when faced a few weeks ago with a real-life moral dilemma, it’s quite clear I failed.

You see, I recently took full advantage of my son’s inability to read and count money.

I exploited an illiterate child.

I cheated a 6-year-old.

It all began with a loose tooth, his first.

The looser the tooth got, the more excited he got at the prospect of being visited — and, in turn, being rewarded — by the Tooth Fairy, that mythological creature who goes around collecting the discarded body parts of young children. (Why kids aren’t more freaked out by that concept, I don’t know. If I hoarded kids’ teeth, I’d be suspected of being a serial killer.)

In the days before the tooth finally detached, I jokingly wondered what a tooth went for in this day and age.

Surely, I said to my wife, a tooth is now worth more than a quarter, which is what I think we got as kids.

We settled on $1.

And then the tooth fell out.

With my wife’s help, he lovingly sealed the tooth — which looked to be approximately the size of a grain of rice — in an envelope and stuck it under his pillow.

It was understood that the Tooth Fairy would come along at some point when everyone was asleep and make the trade.

It soon dawned on me, though, that I didn’t have any money.

I haven’t actually carried cash since about 1999, using a debit card for most everything.

And because of that, I also never have any spare change.

So I was presented with two options that evening — I could change out of my pajamas and make an ATM run, or I could just put my Visa card under his pillow.

I chose to take the easy route — I broke into my son’s piggy bank.

“Are you stealing from our son?” my wife asked, semi-disgusted, when she heard the lid being popped off his little metal bank.

“Well,” I hissed, “do you have four quarters?”

“Well, no,” she answered.

I suppose the Tooth Fairy could have written a check, but, as I argued, the kid has no concept of money at this stage in his life.

The next morning, we were awakened by an announcement that, “THE TOOTH FAIRY WAS HERE!”

“What did she leave you?” I asked.

“Four dimes!” he shouted.

“No, those are quarters,” my wife instructed.

Whatever they were, we soon heard the plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk of the coins being deposited into his little bank.

Life moved on.

And then, a week later, another tooth fell out.

Remember the opening of the old “Top Cat” cartoon series, when sly ol’ TC slips the door man a quarter, then yanks it back on a string as he’s walking off?

Well, I may or may not have gone straight back into his room, popped the lid off the bank and pulled out the same four quarters.

Care to guess what happened the next morning?

“THE TOOTH FAIRY WAS HERE!”

Followed by plunk, plunk, plunk, plunk.

Does all this make me a bad parent?

Shady, maybe, but bad?

Let’s reserve judgment until all the teeth have fallen out.

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