Fairytale Love

 

Snow White 1937, Cinderella 1950, Sleeping Beauty 1959, The Little Mermaid 1989, Beauty and the Beast 1991, Tangled 2010....these are the fairytales I grew up with, well the earlier ones anyway. Disney just keeps on pumping them out so I can't really keep up. The heroines get a little pluckier with time but the story's still the same.

I'm wishing...

Once upon a time there was going to be this person who would find me or I would find them and it would be magical. Somehow, they would totally understand me and I would of course totally understand them. They would look at me and see something utterly beautiful inside and out and I would see every secret special thing they hid from the world and treasure them. The first animated movies I saw as a kid, the stories my grandmother read to me, they all painted the same cotton candy picture. Fluffy, pink, spun from sugar and air. Fairytale love.

A dream is a wish your heart makes...

Between the time I was 6 to the time I was 10 I was sort of malleable, I guess. I’d rejected the frilly girl thing in favor of running around in jeans and t-shirt with my cousin, a boy born the same year as myself. But I still played dress-up as princesses and Wonder Woman.

 I was probably feeling out the whole boy/girl dynamic and this was the 70’s so, you know, kind of trendy. I mean did I want to be rescued or do the rescuing? And if I wanted to be bold did that mean I gave up the option to be rescued at a later date? Kids can be complicated little people. Give them credit.

Enter my mom. I loved my mom. My dad could be kind and giving but just as often distant and moody. Mom was gentle and loving and most importantly present. But she was also a realist with a capital R. Probably the clearest early memory I have of her is a lesson on lowering your expectations. It’s actually sort of a fond memory and it makes me laugh even if it kind of sounds like a weird vaguely depressing thing to say to your 8-year-old kid.

And then you wake up I guess?

It was Halloween and there was a costume contest that afternoon at school. I was over the moon because I was going to blow the roof off this Mutha’! My grandmother had outdone herself once again with another hand sewn costume, a princess dress complete with draped bustle, silver sequins up the front, and flowing sleeves that bunched into poofs from the elbows to the shoulders. I was vibrating with excitement and must have crowed to my mom that I was sure I’d win.

we would have fit right in with these kids

That was when she sat me down on my poofy butt and explained how I should handle this. “Sweetie,” she said, “it’s really better if you pretend that you’re going to lose. Just, you know, think about it that way. Then when you lose it won’t feel so bad.”

Wow. The ultimate buzzkill. It makes me laugh because A) it makes such a great story to tell at parties. You know, what’s the most Fu*&ed up thing your parents ever told you as a kid? And B) I know mom was genuinely trying to protect me in that moment. I believe that she knew exactly what it felt like to spend most of your life wanting things that just disappoint you by either never happening or by straight up soul crushing failure. She wanted to keep me safe from all of that pain and the best way she knew how was to start teaching me not to want things that were “out of reach”.

Reality bites.

I didn’t hear stories about passionate love matches as I was growing up. Not between real people that I knew. My parents would sometimes talk about how they met. Mom was a teacher at a school where dad was a janitor. They attended a staff social event where she was introduced as the young lady who spilled coffee on the rug he’d complained about cleaning. When he finally proposed, the charming story is that it went something like, “If I weren’t so in debt right now, I’d probably ask you to marry me.”

This was what a real rom-com looked like, right? Meet-cutes were duller, proposals less swoon-worthy. And certainly, the hard-core romances were utterly bunk. My aunt, mom’s youngest sister, and her husband were the closest I got to a romantic couple. And their stories all revolved around their bond as friends first. They loved being together and they were the best role models I ever had for relationships and marriage. But they never talked about passionate romance, just deep personal connection with each other. So, the best sort of love was with someone you cared deeply for, who understood you, who supported you, and could be your best friend for the rest of your lives together. The rest of it was….what?

Bibidi Bobidi Boo-Hoo?

As the gap between what I knew from my family and what I saw in movies and fairy tales widened I probably started to ask questions. Which is likely when I heard more of these “how I met your father” stories. My mom was telling her version of the fairy tale. In this one Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty all get their shit together, get a degree in something useful like education or nursing so they can support themselves and then later they might meet a nice cobbler with good health insurance and a nice sense of humor and no hero complex.

Lower your expectations and you’ll never be disappointed. Or at least you won’t be surprised when you are. Yeah, all those ladies got their Prince Charming. But if they hadn’t, they would have been where? Cinderella—an abused slave in her step mother’s home. Snow White—in a coma in a glass coffin. Sleeping Beauty—also in a coma in a castle tower. Why so many comas? Mom just didn’t want to see me…in a coma?

Ever happy after?

I could probably go somewhere with that as a metaphor but I’ll refrain. The kinds of stories our parents tell us about the possibilities of love. How good, scary, varied, restricted, freeing, or confining they paint it for us at the beginning leaves an indelible mark. No matter how old you get, or how many new things you learn about how the world really works for you. There is always going to be that little kid in your head who first learned how to love another person from stories your parents told.

So, the question for me has become, did I miss out on passionate romantic love because I listened to the little kid in my head and lowered my expectations in that department? Or was it truly an organic thing, a ship that never passed my way? Possibly it was a mix of both?

My mom passed away more than 8 years ago. I miss her but not as keenly as I did at first. I have more questions for her now than ever. Maybe that’s just part of getting older. There are certainly a lot of questions I would ask her about this that I never asked her back then. And I wonder, with greater perspective so much further down the road from where we began, if her answers might not be surprising.