*There are so many more awesome princess trashing images here. Happy Friday. You’re welcome.
So Disney made a movie about Cinderella.
You know the ominous way characters from Game of Thrones whisper “winter is coming” and everybody gets big eyes and you know, you just KNOW, that that ain’t good?
That’s how I feel about this movie.
I’ve watched cartoon Cinderella 4,872 times with Jane. I’ve counted.
Okay, maybe I haven’t counted. But I’m certain that when I make it to the next life, and if there’s some sort of Beetlejuice-esque purgatory waiting room, Cinderella will be playing on one of those old square TV’s mounted near the ceiling in the corner of the room. Plus, the purgatory powers that be will make me drink Pedialite while I wait, which is basically like water boarding for my taste buds.
Never mind, that’s not purgatory. That’s hell.
As with anything that attracts or annoys me, I began to fantasize awful things for Cinderella in order to keep my sanity. Don’t believe me? Read my book. And I LIKE those literary characters. Princesses I loathe, so the stuff I imagine about them is usually truly awful. Jasmine got the HPV virus from Aladdin. Belle went out to lunch with her friends and when one of them asked her how Beast was she screamed, “I don’t know, why don’t you ask his boyfriend!” Ariel discovered that Eric was a narcissist who liked to gas light her by messing with the settings on her bathroom scale.
Trashing the concept of princesses is a common one. They’re pretty much the opposite of most strong female ideals. They’re an easy target, with their cumbersome dresses and ridiculous crowns. I realize I’m shooting fish in a barrel. An old barrel full of old fish. And the fact remains that I am a mother to a three year old little girl who lives and breathes princesses and I’m not going to stop that. She loves it. I hate it. It’s just good practice for the future onslaught of boy bands and shorts that don’t pass the bend over rule of modesty.
But I’ve finally figured out why they piss me off so much. It’s not the poofy dresses. It’s not the male obsessed existences. It’s the lack of reality or dimension to their personalities. There’s no authenticity. Their outsides can’t possibly match their insides. In fact, outsides usually don’t match insides. And the entire institution of princesses is so hell bent on preserving that appearance of perfection when in reality sometimes the nicest outside masks the ugliest reality.
I mean, just look at the Bill Cosby debacle.
I’d like to think that after Cinderella fled the ball, and discovered her pumpkin coach had a rotten wheel base, she found herself on the side of the road, head in her hands, a pounding hangover headache already coming on and thought to herself, “I’ve really gotta figure out how to do this life thing differently.”
I have always, until the last six months, felt this way about my life.
My outsides said normal. My insides said, “If people only knew.”
My outsides said happy. My insides said, “You cry every night and no one knows.”
My outsides said loved. My insides said, “You’re alone.”
And like Cinderella, stranded on the side of the road with a rotten pumpkin and hair extensions askew, I reached a point in life where I had to re-evaluate. Well, I say re-evaluate and you might say Chernobyled. But either way it turned the tides, ending the era of fake-princess-facade and launched me into a new life. I would rather die than live an un-authentic life. To me, living an un-authentic life is death. And maybe that statement is princessy and melodramatic in and of itself, but I don’t care. I mean it.
My new life is sometimes stressful. Sometimes scary. It’s uncertain. My outsides look a little messy, and my insides are a little messy. But there’s no more fake life to maintain anymore.
But I had to finally, after years of unmatched outsides and insides, admit that my pumpkin was indeed rotten.
So I stopped riding in it.
