I am searching for the fairy tale with my name on it. The one that ends, and she lived happily ever after.
I am a child of the fifties. Television came into my world at the age of three or four when I was naive enough to believe those little people galloping around on tiny white horses lived inside that box and if my Daddy would just open it up, I could play with them like I did my dolls.
I napped to Queen For A Day. I imagined a field filled with plants that had baby kittens just waiting to be picked. My Daddy took me to a store where he bought me my first pen. It was silver and sky blue and I knew I would write wondrous things with it. Most of the world lived outside of mine.
My world was a Mommy who told me she could be anyone, that the woman before me might not really be Mommy, but Santa Claus watching to see if I was good. It was a Daddy who sat with me at the dining room table for conferences about giving up my bottle at bedtime and to show me photographs of a real crown in a book.
They were the powers that governed my first four years. My mother was busy. Our time together was spent ironing, me the handkerchiefs, her, everything else, while we talked. I "got" to clean the bathroom floor on my hands and knees with a rag and Ajax, because I was a big girl. No one thought about safety in those days. At least not in our house. I began doing cross stitch at four and learned to write the number 10 with my pen on the back of a shirt cardboard that my father's shirts came back on from the cleaners.
It never occurred to me that there was any other time and place for everything. For me the time was always now and here. The only stories I heard were my grandmother's oral tales about country mice and city mice, or the occasional little Golden book my mother might read. Books for me were almost nonexistent until I learned to read. Then on my sixth birthday my father's mother, my other grandmother, gave me a book of Grimm's Fairy Tales. All those words and no pictures!
But that same grandmother also took me to see a puppet show called, Rumpelstilskin, and my imagination was set on fire. Hungry for stories and with no access to the city library, I began devouring my book of fairy tales along with the books my father put on the hall bookshelf. Junior Classics, Books of Lands and People, The Book of Knowledge. These were the places my dreams began.
All of these things, stories, books and television programs, had a beginning, a middle and an end. I assumed my life would too. I cannot tell you how often I have found myself as the narrator of my life in that moment, almost as if I were outside it looking in.
My marriage, instead of being the glory years, turned out to be the Cinderella years with my children taking the place of the prince to change the story around to happily ever after once they were part of my life. My divorce was the time spent locked up in the wicked witch's candy house, wondering if I would end up in the oven, or outside eating cake. And this past year was the great love affair that ended in soul shattering despair!
Now, for the first time ever maybe, I have stepped out of the fairy tale and onto the pages of my own biography. Not an autobiography, there is nothing auto in my life. Ever. But this life where I am aware everything depends on me is a novelty. Whoever wrote my story forgot that it had to end happily ever after. It might not! Or maybe it will, if I choose the right adventure each time.
I keep searching for the right words, the ultimate authority, a fool proof God, a belief system that survives all intruders. I keep hoping to find The Angell's Tale.
