Once upon a time

Me, age 39

After years of empty nesting with my dad, my mother has decided that she’s sick of my old stuff cluttering up her closets – my stuff and the stuff of my three younger sisters. Prom dresses, diaries, yearbooks and the like. She’s lobbed everything into boxes and has summoned us to claim our personal effects at our earliest convenience or they will be chucked in the trash.

Let’s be frank: After perusing the contents of my boxes, I see that much of it does indeed belong in the trash, or at least on e-bay. Particularly an old Madame Alexander doll whose pupils seem to follow me wherever I move around the room. I found this quality unnerving as a child and even more unnerving as an adult.

While sorting through my stuff, eager to part with most of it, I find a stack of old high school newspapers. The issue on top appears to be the last of my senior year, a sort of retrospective of our time in high school, including the results of a senior survey. I can’t remember anything about said senior survey and am thus alarmed to see my name listed smack in the middle of the page. Good God, what did the senior survey have to say about me?

Thankfully, I am not “most likely to be a brown noser.” (An unnecessarily harsh category, I reckon.) Nor am I “most likely to be president.” (No surprise there.) Instead – drum roll, please – I am “most likely to get the whole fairytale.”

I read it again, stunned. Most likely to get the whole fairytale.

“Most likely to get the whole fairytale? What does that mean?” I ask out loud.

                                                                                                                                                

What can high schoolers possibly know about fairytales and who is most likely to get them? What does a fairytale look like in the first place? Does it have a different sheen and shape to an 18-year-old than it does to a grown woman with a family, a house, and loads of responsibilities as well as laundry*? And why ever was I picked among my graduating class of 1992 to be most likely to get it?

These questions, however, are completely irrelevant. Towering over all of them is the great big important one: Did I get the fairytale after all?

Like most mothers and wives, I don’t feel like I’m living anything extraordinary. More times than not, my hair is askew and my clothes are crumbly with some sort of dried food. I clean toilets and help the kids with their homework. My life is not glamorous.

And yet.

I have good health, a great husband, three bright kids, a close-knit extended family, and a house perfect for hosting dear friends. There are days when I feel like Cinderella (the shabby Cinderella, let’s get that straight), scrubbing, cooking and generally serving as my family’s doormat, but don’t I have everything I’ve ever wanted?

Yes, I do.

Furthermore, I understand that fairytales go way beyond princesses and fairies. They dig deep to find meaning, humor and even entertainment in the messy stuff of life. From this perspective, I guess I’ve got a fairytale.   

“I guess I’ve got a fairytale,” I say out loud. It has a nice ring to it.

“I’m good at digging deep, just like a fairytale,” I add, with growing enthusiasm.

Except – wait just a minute – that is not exactly accurate. 

I’m good at digging deep only when I’m not inches away from insanity trying to manage a household and raise three children. So let’s be honest: I’m not good at digging deep, because I’m never not inches away from insanity.

But isn’t it possible?, I wonder, avoiding the gaze of the Madame Alexander doll sitting next to me. Isn’t it possible to have a fairytale while at the same time struggling not to lose one’s mind? Like so many women I know – friends who are mothers and wives and countless other things on top of that – can I try really hard to take a step back and reframe the messy moments of my life, looking at them in a different way?

And, even more important, can I summon up the courage to share these messy moments with other people, being brutally honest and saying the beastly things so many women feel but don’t want to admit to?   

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I can.”

And I will.

The result, as it turns out, is this blog. Thank you very much for reading.

*Laundry will play a recurring role in this blog. In fact, the repetition of laundry in this blog will mirror the role that laundry plays in my real life: It never goes away. Just when you think you’ve seen the last of it for awhile, it comes back. If you get sick of hearing about my laundry, you’ll begin to understand how sick I am of the laundry itself.