I gave birth to a Disney Princess. I don’t know how it happened. Yes, I’d put in a request for a girl but I just figured I’d get a girl like the kind I was - a muddy, adventurous, tree-climbing, slaying imaginary dragons with stick swords, doll-hating, decidedly non-princessy girl. And pink! Boy howdy does this girl love herself some pink. To quote M'Lynn Eatonton, "It looks like the place has been hosed down with Pepto Bismal."
Please don’t get me wrong, I love her just exactly the way she is even if I find her bewildering sometimes. Y’all she can put on false eyelashes! I had no idea real people could do that. I thought you had a makeup artist that did it or one of those YouTube makeup girls who do tutorials for a hobby. Not real people who had jobs working with small children or took AP exams in flannel pajama bottoms like my girl does/did.
She wears lipstick on the reg like women of my mother and grandmother’s generations did. How do you even remember you need to reapply that stuff? She just shrugs when I ask her And she dresses cute for school. For no reason. Not like it’s picture day just any day. Tuesday. It’s all so odd to me.
And it makes me love her all the more. She’s herself. One hundred percent. Even growing up with a mother who generally wasn’t interested in those means of expressing oneself.
Now we get to the Disney part.
Wild animals love my daughter.
Small children love my daughter.
Adults love my daughter.
Everyone loves my daughter.
I don’t blame anyone for loving her. She’s a special human - sweet, kind, talented, smart, clever, and beautiful, inside and outside.
She loves books, especially Harry Potter (she’s not so different from other kids her age in that respect), but also mysteries like her mom. She goes more for historicals than I do but she’ll take a contemporary. She’s super proud that I’m a writer and tells total strangers about my books. She’s also super excited to hang out with my author friends who … you guessed it, adore her.
Then she did something truly awful. She went away to college. Can you believe it?
It’s been a weird time for me. My house is tidier than it’s ever been. There are no shoes kicked off everywhere (yup, she loves shoes too) or wet towels on the bed (apparently, real life Disney princesses don’t come with the cartoon animals to keep house) and I do the dishes and laundry so much less often. But it’s lonelier too. No music blasting in her bathroom while she showers. No giggles as she FaceTimes with her friends or boyfriend. Much of the light and life is gone.
People tell me adjusting to the “new” normal is a process. I’ve been making plans to redo her bathroom and finally turn the second closet in her room into built-ins. Then we went to her school for Family Weekend. We attended the Study Abroad fair and she’s very excited about a few programs - Scotland and Bath, England specifically. She didn’t want to go to most of the rest of the planned activities so we made our own itinerary and she showed us around her new city. We went to the petting zoo that was only rescues. Then to a living museum and yet more animals that cannot live in the wild.
We saw Fort Monroe which is also called Freedom’s Fort and saw a whole raft of information about all the people who died but it was the pet cemetery along the fort’s ramparts that she refused to look at. Cemeteries give her the creeps even ones full of beloved pets who lived inside the walls of the fort and in death spend eternity guarding the perimeter.
We ate lots and lots of really great food!
When we left her after the obligatory Target run I was fine. I did cross stitch on the way home and then we got here and back to our baby puppies but … it didn’t feel like home anymore. She’d been gone a month already but it was just yesterday that this house didn’t make sense to my heart anymore.
The castle has lost it’s princess sparkle, I guess.
I’m sure it is a huge adjustment. I’m glad it sounds like you are taking princess steps to getting there.
Posted by: Mark | September 17, 2019 at 07:42 AM