My mother often railed at the “happily ever after” mentality and the mindset that it teaches children. She told me how there is no happily ever after, because the wedding is only the beginning and it’s hard.
By the time that she thought to tell me this, I didn’t believe her one bit. She’d already read me fairy tales, and I’d seen all sorts of Disney movies that ended with a wedding. Sure, the wedding is the beginning: the beginning of happily ever after.
As a young child, I subconsciously saw marriage as my ultimate goal in life. This mentality goes as far back as I can remember, when I already had decided on the boy that I was going to marry. I don’t know what led to such a warped idea of reality, so I can only surmise.
But all of my books were either about children, or if they were about older people, it was a fairy tale or a similar sort of story that ended in marriage. I dreamed of doing things with my life, yes: of being a farmer on a ranch or a horse trainer or an archaeologist. Yet in all those visions of the future, there was always a vague figure of a man who would be my husband, because of course I had to have one.
Looking back, I lament that despite my mother railing at Disney and fairy tales for creating this mentality, she bought us Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, 101 Dalmatians, The Sword in the Stone, Aladdin and the Lion King. Absent were movies such as the Fox and the Hound, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book or Peter Pan. Furthermore, I picked up on my mother’s not-subtle-enough distaste for Aladdin and the Lion King, and she was not at all subtle in her dislike of 101 Dalmatians. I would feel a vague sort of guilt (and in fact, I still do) at enjoying those movies and stopped watching them. When Lilo and Stitch came out and my friends were talking about it at school, my mother would not take me to see it because the trailer gave her the impression that it was too violent. She bought Ever After, and that became her comfort movie, and by extension, mine.
When I was about eleven or twelve, I discovered that I rather enjoyed romances more than the rest of books. Sometimes, I would entirely ignore a plot, reading a book only for the romantic subplot. I was a talker, and no doubt tired of hearing me read a mystery only to come out gushing about the love story, my mother gave me two romance novels for teenagers.
While I enjoyed them, something felt inherently off about these books: the plots too contrived, the antagonists too mean, and nothing really happening. I went back to reading non-romance books for the romances. So my mother tried a different approach. When I would read a book and come out of it talking about the romance, she would not-so-subtly tell me that she didn’t think that part was that important, because “picking your boyfriend is something people do everyday.”
Which further engrained in me this idea that I would have to eventually pick a boyfriend (and therefore husband).
It wasn’t only the happily ever after mentality. It was also the contrast between what my mother said and what others told me. For instance, my mother bought me both Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. I was immediately drawn to the Hardy Boys, and picked up the book and started reading. One of my aunts saw me and asked me why I didn’t read Nancy Drew.
“Hardy Boys is for boys,” she said to me. “Nancy Drew is for girls.”
I felt stupid and ashamed and even after I ran out of Nancy Drew books to read, I didn’t dare touch the Hardy Boys book, because I was a girl. It was four years later that I realized what nonsensical logic that was, and in a bed and breakfast in Australia, picked up a Hardy Boys book for the second time. But it was too late. The tone was too childish and simple to be enjoyable to me. I closed the book and turned off my reading light and stared at the bunk above me where my sisters were sleeping, wondering why I’d ever listened.
Such instances happened a lot. I would do something that subverted someone else’s gender norm, that someone else would tell me I was wrong, and I would feel ashamed and try to comply with these rules that I didn’t understand. So I grew up in a confused array of mixed messages, understanding that my life was about my femininity, which put me on a track headed toward marriage to a man, with certain roles I had to fulfill as a woman, but that I wasn’t supposed to talk about any of it. I was supposed to pretend.
By the time I was in my late teens, I reached the point where I could hold my own against people who felt that I wasn’t fulfilling the gender role that they expected me to fill: but by that point, it was a rarity. I neatly slotted into what most societies relevant to me expected of females. It took years for me to dig deeper into my own assumptions.
My mother continued to rail at fairy tales and Disney and the happily ever mentality, but it took decades for me to at last open my ears to the alarm bells as she ranted about this subject. At last I came to realize that even as she complained, she had accidentally indoctrinated me. And then I gradually realized that everything was optional: not just for other people, but for me, too. I didn’t necessarily have to get married. I didn’t have to learn to clean and cook to take care of people. I didn’t even have to date.
So maybe my mother failed in my childhood to raise a child free of the gender-based shackles that society places on one. But by accidentally indoctrinating me and trying so hard to break me out of it, she taught me an even more valuable lesson about the forces of society and the ridiculousness of neat little gender-based boxes.