I’ve been reading a book which is basically a Sleeping Beauty variant. Generally I really enjoy a well done rewrite of a fairy tale, but this time something keeps bugging me and I figure if I write about it in here I’ll purge it from my brain and be able to enjoy the rest of the book.
Why did the parents send away their daughter?
Supposedly sending the baby girl away keeps her safer from the evil which cast a spell on her. But it also deprives both parents and daughter of all meaninful contact during all of her childhood years. Suppose the daughter is kept completely safe and is returned to her parents at age 16. Yay, the spell has been defeated, but daughter and parents are left with no real relationship and no way to make up for lost time. Now suppose that the spell comes into full force when the daughter is 10 and she dies. The parents have been deprived of what might have been 10 years of enjoying the company of their daughter.
Maybe it is because I’m a controlling parent, but I would have a really hard time handing over my daughter. I wouldn’t believe that anyone else could do as good a job as I would raising her and keeping her safe. I would find a solution which allowed me to keep her as safe as possible while still being the one who raises her.
And as soon as I finished writing the above I started thinking about the courage of birth parents who give up their babies to adoptive parents. In essence the dilemma of Sleeping Beauty’s parents happens every day. Every day there is a young mother who looks down at her beloved child and knows she must give the child up to strangers so that the child will have a better future. And these young birth mothers have no promise that the child will every come back, not at 16 or 18 or ever. Such courage puts me into awe. I don’t know that I could be so noble. Especially not if it required me to hand over one of my children.
It seems pretty common for that time period for Royalty to have somebody else raise their children – Nursery maid, Governess, Tutor. Even if the children were still in the home/castle they were there to be “seen and not heard” and only at appropriate times. The King was too busy running the country and the Queen too busy running the affairs of the castle. Not until they were old enough to interact with adults on an intelligent level did royal children seem to have much interaction with their parents. It didn’t look right for Royal parents to have to deal with the unpleasant emanations from their children, there were servants employed to changed smelly diapers and to quiet screaming tantrums.
I’m sure more Royals than we think doted on and took time for their children. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find accounts of royal families who never had interaction until the children were “of age”.
A few years ago, when I was living in Orem, we had one of those 5th Sunday of the month joint priesthood/relief society meetings, where they presented this movie that was about the church adoption stuff, and (I think also) about convincing your single, pregnant friends that adopting might be a better option than driving off a cliff or something.
I watched about 10 minutes of it, then I found myself uncontrollably angry, and I had to leave early and go play Team Fortress. The thing that kept running through my head was along the lines of “you can have my baby when you pry her from my cold dead arms”.
Note that this is from the same guy who read a few selected chapters of “The Miracle of Forgiveness” that were assigned him by a bishop and just about stopped going to church. Er, wait, I only read the first few pages of that ONE chapter. Yeah. Someday I’m going to read the whole book. Maybe that stuff will make sense in context, but I don’t see how it could.
The only version of that story that I’ve ever consumed is the Disney version. My 3 1/2 year old of course loves it. Were I a king, you can betcha there would have been some guards a little faster with the spears and the throwing and the poking. Were I the kind, you can betcha there wouldn’t have been some silly fairies taking my daughter, particularly not those three. I’ve always believed that the best way to deal with these sorts of things is about 12 tons of prevention, and about 30 tons of information. When your kid is young, you keep the needles clear. As your kid grows, you explain the situation. A little training, a little ninja skills, a little magical protection to prevent compulsion, these sorts of things will go a long way towards making sure that the witch dies lonely and unfulfilled.
So, yeah, I’m right there with ya, more or less.
I’m with you on the Bi-yearly LDS social services presentation. I’ve yet to sit through one. I know that the message they give is good and that there are people who really need it. I also know that some of the people who don’t think they need it actually do need it. But I object to being made to cry. Those presentations radiate so much raw emotional pain that I choose to not subject myself to it when I’ve already internalized the factual information they intend to present. I go hide in the nursery and play with the kids instead.
I like your prevention plan. Especially the ninja lessons. Why on earth did disney never think of ninja lessons? 😉
It occurs to me that Disney has all but ignored the existence of the ninja entirely.
You realize that this means they are probably run by ninja.