What I hope to do here is to share some of my writing and get some feedback. Most of the things I write are about myself or my family and they are based in reality. If you are an adult over, say 30, and/or a parent, hopefully you will be able to relate to these essays and find them mildly amusing. (I made the mistake of reading a couple of them to a 25-year-old friend, and, though she was polite about it, she merely smiled and said, "That's interesting." I need to understand my demographic a little better, I guess.)
So, here goes... I hope you enjoy what I have to say...
REALITY CHECK
I always wanted to be a mother. I have tried to be a good mother.
With all three of my sons I tried to nurture in them a sense of wonder and a feeling of magic in the world around them.
I thought I was succeeding.
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My youngest son, Jared, age four, lay on my bed, his cheeks flushed with fever, his body covered with chicken pox, his lips wrapped around a freezer pop. I had struggled for three days to find ways to distract him from scratching. I had run out of ideas.
I climbed on the bed beside him and turned on the television. The Disney Channel! There was always something good showing there - something I might be able to share with him to divert his attention from his itchy, warm, little body.
Oh! "Sleeping Beauty"! The live action movie with real actors, not a cartoon with silly looking characters and anthropomorphic animals. This would be great! A story of fairies and wonder and destiny!
We watched together as the good fairies bestowed gifts on Beauty and then, as the bad, angry fairy told her parents that Beauty would prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die.
We were relieved as the good fairies changed the bad fairy's curse from a death sentence to a deep sleep over the entire kingdom for one hundred years.
We heard the king order his subjects to check every room of the castle and the entire kingdom and destroy all the spinning wheels so he could protect his daughter from this fate.
Servants scurried from room to room searching for and shattering any spinning wheel they found. One such servant stepped into an empty room and looked around. Not seeing anything, he closed the door and left.
The camera slowly panned across the room. There, behind a folding screen, was a spinning wheel! The servant hadn't seen it and now Beauty might prick her finger and sleep for a hundred years!
I leaned over to Jared and said, in an awed stage whisper, "Oh, no! He didn't see that spinning wheel!"
Jared leaned over to me, eyes still on the television, and said, in the same awed whisper, "So, only the cameraman knows it's there?"
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Some children are just too based in reality to watch The Disney Channel with their mothers.
