A Reality Tale

Recently, a friend asked, “Is it wrong to want my child to have the fairytale?”

The reference was to the loss of her son’s team in the semifinals of the local Little League championship. The team had gone undefeated through the season and into the playoffs, only to lose to another squad that had less talent on paper but was peaking at the right time.

Watching your child deal with a tough loss is heartbreaking, because it’s natural as parents to want our sons and daughters to have the fairytale ending. And more often than not, we rediscover over and over again that fairytales are just fiction, that “real life” rarely ends the way we would like.

Still, we try. That’s why we buy lottery tickets and compete in contests with little scraps of scratch off cardboard, hoping we’ll be the 1 in 8,373,722 that gets picked. It’s why parents twist and contort schedules and make them look like the intersections of the interstate highway system, just so our children can have opportunities we did not.

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Call me a cynic, but I’ve always thought something was fundamentally wrong with fairytales. First, the creators start with the premise that the protagonist’s family has to be screwed up, with at least one parent dead or absent. (The word “grim” predates the author, but it seems to be the embodiment of Grimm’s Fairytales.)

Second, the derring-do section of the story always involves the handsome prince — “Here I’ve come to save the day!” — swooping in and rescuing the princess before the inevitable “happily ever after” ending. Except, in fairytales, the prince looks nothing like Mighty Mouse or Andy Kaufman.

Like many of my generation, I love The Princess Bride, which tweaks this fairytale premise in such a smart and clever way. (I still remember the line on the back jacket of the tattered paperback: “What happens when the most beautiful woman in the world meets the handsomest prince in the world, and he turns out to be a son-of-a-bitch?”)

My first exposure to the book was in Mrs. Selman’s 9^th grade world history class; every Friday, she read us a chapter and acted out all the parts.

I don’t remember a thing about World History. I will never forget The Princess Bride. It still is one of my best memories of high school.

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I’m not so jaded that I fail to understand the appeal of the fantasy, but my worldview tends to tilt more toward the “Reality Bites” side. More specifically, it should be dubbed “Reality is Waiting to Bite.”

That’s why I tell my kids all the time, “Don’t court bad karma. If you do, it will find you. And it might anyway, but you don’t want to go looking for it.”

Someone once told me that children in the throes of adolescence lose 10 years of maturity the moment they reach 13. For some, it starts coming back around age 17 or 18; for others, it never seems to return.

So, emotionally speaking, I’m supposed to be back in the land of 3 and 4 year olds. And there are times when I can see that in all of my children.

For the most part, that’s not the case. As parents, Jill and I are very lucky, but we know it’s not a fairytale by any means.

Still, we won’t stop pursuing the happy ending… You never do with your children.