Happily Ever After

Once upon a time a little girl was born in the kingdom of wishful thinking.  She was beautiful, with eyes that sparkled like blue diamonds and hair like ebony. Everyone thought that she would live happily ever after, especially when her prince came. But…after the honeymoon her prince began to tell her she couldn’t do anything “just right” . The porridge she made was awful and she needed to make the bed perfectly. He  became abusive to her, and poof her happily ever after became fear and bruises. I don’t want to hear this non-fairy tale. It could be a horrible coincidence, but I may still harbor a Goldilocks and Cinderella complex because I have an embarrassing number of pairs of shoes, and most of them are not “just right”.

Happy endings in fairy tales are foretold by standard phrases like “happily ever after” or “And they lived happily ever after”. Good is supposed triumph over evil, love is stronger than hate   We want happy endings or it just doesn’t feel right. Let’s go  back to simpler and better times where there was justice for all. If I do all the right things, I will insure that bad things will not happen to me. Bad things do happen to good people.  Who wants to believe Murphy Law, which says that “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”?  There is no comfort in this proverb.

Where are all the damsels in distress? They are busy being rescued by their savior,  the prince.  I was part of the women’s lib movement in the 70’s,  so I threw away my bra and my belief that I needed a man, and embraced equality . Not so fast…my mouth was repeating the feminist manifesto, but my actions and feelings were not keeping up. I thought fairy tales and happy endings went up in the smoke from the joint I was smoking. I huffed and puffed and blew the house down, but what about second hand smoke? Was I still a damsel in distress? While professing to believe in the power of women, I think I was still following the trail of bread crumbs into the woods that led me to captivity and dependence. I was an ambivalent slow learner with generations of fairy tales to question and evaluate.

I’m over 70, but sometimes I still believe in fairy tales. Come to think of it, there are no heroines in fairy tales who are old Ike me. We usually get the roles of the wicked witch or the evil queen. “Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the fairest of them all?” Maybe the biggest fairy tale of all is that only the young can be beautiful and deserving

Maybe instead of rewriting our history and banning books that reflect reality, we could  start teaching our children that a ‘happily ever after” does not exist, and there is no goal or challenge that can be met that guarantees  everlasting happiness and success. I think the best choice is to experience and live happy moments in between life’s challenges. Expect problems and learn from them to become strong. So there is no magic wand, glass slipper or fairy dust that we can rely on to give us our fairy-tale ending. Writer Michael Ford has edited a book of erotic tales for men called “Happily Ever After”. The irony is not lost on me.