A Fairy Tale Ending

My three-year-old daughter is all girl these days: baby dolls, nail polish, sparkles, pink everything, ballerinas, and fairy tales.

Fairy tales.  Sometimes I'd rather stick toothpicks under my fingernails.

Often, Piper asks me to read "Goldilocks" or "The Gingerbread Man", but her favorite fairy tales are the ones with princesses, the ones that make me cringe the most.

I remember going to see Beauty and the Beast at the mall.  It was my first movie to view in theaters, and it has a certain appeal to me as an adult today: A person falls in love with another human being who is, in many respects, completely undesirable.  I still enjoy witnessing stories in which rough characters soften under the pursuing and undeserved affections of someone else.

The stories Piper loves though, are the ones with the beautiful girls named Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel.  At her age, I'm sure I adored those, too, but now, they become increasingly more absurd with each nighttime reading.

"He saw her and immediately fell in love."

"The shoe fit, and they got married the next day and lived happily ever after."

"The princess woke up.  The spell was broken by true love's first kiss."

What?!

Kids and adults eat this stuff up, but have you ever really thought about the message of these tales?  Admittedly, I hadn't until recently.

Boys like the prettiest girls.  

It is entirely possible, and common, to fall in love with someone without ever having talked to her.  (I suppose that one is debatable, but I am personally skeptical of the idea of love at first sight.)

Marry the right person, and you live happily ever after.

People seem to want fairy tale endings.  They do seem easier.  Who doesn't desire a beautiful spouse and a "happily ever after" with no cares in the world?

As 2016 wraps up and I think about the end of another year, I'm realizing that I don't want a fairy tale ending.  I don't want it for myself or for my girls.  I want real life.

Real life is messy.  It's raw and not glamorous and gosh, just hard sometimes.  But there it is, in the very expression: It is real.  My desire is not to float through existence with my head in the clouds, happy but lacking true joy.  Because joy comes from having fully experienced deep sadness, loss, and waiting...and then waking up to a new day and realizing that you've tread through the greatest valleys and survived.

Fairy tales provide some sort of superficial, feel-good, momentary happiness, but they don't offer an abiding sense of contentment, which is what I ultimately crave for my little family.

That said, I'll probably read a fairy tale to Piper tonight, as I have for the past four months in a row...and throw up a little bit in my mouth as I do.  Tonight, she's three, and some battles just aren't worth fighting.

Happy New Year, friends.  May you experience real life, with all of its ups and downs, and find an ending that is better than a fairy tale in 2017.