Fairy Tales To Help With Reality

It was called Junior High when I was in it, and I had a yellow writing folder for Language Arts. All the students had one. In black letters, on the front, were the words: THE WRITING PROCESS and then, nice and neat in a circle were definitions for pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. I loved this folder. I loved keeping my stories – drafts on yellow paper with faint green lines, revisions on white notebook paper with comments from classmates when we peer edited, and grey paper print outs from my dad’s Commodore 64 as final drafts – stapled and filed on the left-hand side of the folder. I loved the stories I’d finished, and written on the back of the folder. There were several black lines for writing the title and the date of our stories. I loved staring at the writing process on the front. I found comfort in the circle – I could always go back. I could always try again. I was never finished.

I think we kept the folder for the 7th and 8th grade, and mine was thick by the turn of the decade when Janet Jackson claimed we were a part of a rhythm nation. I loved looked through everything I’d tired to write: poetry, fiction, research writing, Creative Nonfiction (though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time). I loved looking from draft to draft, and noticing the changes that were made.

Somewhere on my folder, I also recorded song lyrics. There are a few lyrics from INXS, a bunch from the “Say Anything” soundtrack, several Depeche Mode and Cure lyrics, and, of course, Micheal Jackson, Janet Jackson, Madonna, and Young MC (“She’s dressed in yellow, she says, ‘Hello, come sit next to me, you fine fellow.'”)

There are also Sam Cooke lyrics. I loved Sam Cooke (I still do). I slowly but surely got all of “Bring It Home To Me,” his best song ever, on that folder while simultaneously day dreaming that I would meet a boy to dance with while this song played outside a frat party with the Chicago skyline in the background just like Elizabeth Shue and George Newbern did in “Adventures in Babysitting.”

My love of Sam Cooke comes from my mom, but I don’t remember her saying, “This guy’s good! Listen to him!” I know he was on rotation in our house, and I know she sang and dance along when his songs played. I could count on three types of music/albums playing all the time: Anything Motown, anything Bach, and the HMS Pinafore. My mom sang and dance to all of them, and I’m thinking now these songs were her secret ingredient to the meals she prepared, and that kept us around the table trading stories and savoring every last crumb.

There were never any suggestions to love Sam Cooke is what I’m trying to express. My mom listened to what she loved, and I was caught by that love.

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Hadley and I are in the car driving past the middle school she will attend, and I watch her in the rear view mirror. She is still, and studying where it is she will go. Today, while Amanda Seyfried sings, “I Have A Dream,” from the Mamma Mia soundtrack, Hadley almost whispers, “This school is enormous.”

I think to tell her that probably there is a sixth grade wing, and that she’ll not have to learn the entire school at once, or that the first several days will be chaotic with a new schedule, but not to worry, she’ll get the hang of it. But Seyfried sings, “If you see the wonder of a fairy tale/you can take the future even if you fail,” and I make eye contact with my oldest and say with as much courage as I can, “It’s about to get so good.”

I want to give Hadley a fairy tale to believe in – a story that not only helps her with reality, but shines hope and love and truth on it so that she grows up remembering the girl she was while becoming the young lady she is. I don’t want her to forget herself. I want Hadley to meet herself, again and again, surprised at what she can handle, at what it is she can do.

What I want is a dress like the one in L.L. Barkat’s The Golden Dress. A mother sews this dress for her girl, and the dress is magic because the mother put a piece of herself in it, so the dress becomes whatever the girl wishes it to become.

Isn’t that how it goes with mothers? We put a small part of ourselves in what we give to our children, perhaps without even knowing we’ve done it. And so a young girl feels Motown in her bloodstream and closes her eyes or squeezes her hands into fists to try to keep from moving to its beat, but she can’t resist, and she dances and she becomes who she was meant to be. We mothers have the ability to pass along what we love to our children simply because we love it, and our children catch it, and it grows into something else. We have that magic. We are the fairy tale.

But the fairy tale won’t work unless it is given away. That’s scary, to sew a golden dress for a daughter. What if she chooses to turn it into something the mother doesn’t agree with? It’s scary to beep bop to Smoky Robinson, Sam Cooke, and Aretha Franklin on a Tuesday winter’s night when everyone walking home from the “el” can see you. It is scary to tell your daughter that she is at a point in her life when, yes, life is going to be confusing and awkward and sad, but it is also going to get so, so good.

It’s scary because the daughter must be the one to believe the fairy tale.

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I gave The Golden Dress  to Hadley one day recently. I was trying to figure out what to write about the story. There’s something uncomfortable and exciting about it, and whatever it is, I think it’s the same thing – like a cracked robin’s egg in an empty nest, a hummingbird flapping her wings – a frenzy of effort –  to hover next to a sage plant so she can get its nectar, waiting behind a yellow school bus, while kids of various sizes climb up its stairs as the red lights blink.

“Can you find a metaphor in this book?” I asked her. She likes to talk about metaphors, and I figured my question was better than asking her what she thinks of the story.

She read, and I waited.

“Well, there’s a raven in the story, and a raven in a story means death.”

I hadn’t noticed, or maybe it was that I hadn’t acknowledged, the raven’s meaning.

“Maybe the mother died,” Hadley said.

Maybe the mother died. Maybe she had to go away. Whatever happened, there was a disruption, a change. The girl couldn’t get the dress to become what she wanted it to become.

That is, until she realizes she holds the magic. It is now hers, it always was, and she must take it, use it, make something with it, and pass it on. To believe in the fairy tale means allowing the story’s truth to take hold of you, allowing it to shape who you are, who you were meant to be, so that you can share yourself – your magic – with others.

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“You Can Dance,” comes on next. It is both mine and Hadley’s favorite song on the album. I don’t know why Hadley likes it, but I love it because of what’s going on in the movie while the song plays: women all over the Greek island are remembering that they can dance, and they are joining in the parade – skipping, singing, twirling, having the time of their lives. I can never watch this scene and not cry.

“Turn it up,” Hadley says, rolling down the window.

I open the sun roof, and turn the volume up.

The song plays, and we drive on.