When I was just a young princess my hopes of finding my prince became much less hopeful with each frog, I forced myself to kiss. I say forced because with the word going around in that day, it was believed that frogs gave you warts. I certainly didn’t want warts and so it went that I had to close my eyes and force myself to kiss each one of those green, or brown, slimy creatures. Much to my dismay, not one of them gave even a whisper of hope that my prince would instantly appear after kissing those gross little creatures.
So, with a big sigh, and the fear of getting warts from each frog, I would spit on the ground, wipe my mouth with the back of my muddy hand, and spit again just to make sure that I got the taste of frog off my lips and all traces of the cooties they could possibly give me along with warts were gone. About the age of seven when I finally gave up on the idea of my finding a prince by kissing frogs. It seemed totally useless to me. Who believes such a stupid thing anyway? Well, I went back to my usual way of trying to find my prince charming and that was in the daydreams I would allow myself to indulge in each day. I did always wonder what a prince and his princess did when they rode away to live happily ever after. It seems that no one I asked knew the answer to that question either.
I asked Uncle Ernie about that and he said I would just have to wait until mine showed up so I could find the answer to that question. I then asked him just when my prince would be showing up. He told me he wasn’t sure when that would be, but he did know that my prince would show up just when he was supposed to. Uncle Ernie said that my prince might even show up as a knight in shining armor and rescue me from a tower. I gave him a kiss and climbed down from his lap. Maybe I would dream of this tonight. I sure did doubt it though.
My little corner of the attic was just the right environment to imagine that happening. In the winter the bare branches of the big acorn tree next door moved across my ceiling as though they were just waiting for me to fall asleep and they would then snatch me up and take me away. When I heard the wind whistling in the dark and saw the branches dancing across the ceiling in such a foreboding manner it was utterly impossible for me to even close my eyes. It was a pretty scary scene that played over and over again each night. When I got too scared, I would call my brother who slept in a bed on the other side of the chimney from me and sometimes he would let me climb into bed with him and he would put his arms around me. I felt safe with him and sometimes thought that maybe he was my knight in shining armor, but I do have to add that he was no prince charming. He was just an older brother who was mean to me as brothers usually are to younger sisters.
Well, even after some time had passed by and I was growing up I still waited for my prince charming but to no avail. I began to believe that there was no such thing as a prince charming who would take me away to live happily ever after. When I had just about given up on the idea of a prince charming even existing at all, I heard my mother say that she had just found her prince charming. I ran to her and asked her where he was and how did she find him. I was eleven at that time and she told me that I was too young to know how to find one, but she had finally found hers and I would find mine someday. I asked her if she was going to ride away and live happily ever after and leave us here.
About that time I started into JR High School for seventh and eighth grades. It became a painful realization that there was no such thing as a prince charming and there were no knights in shining armor either to come and find me or rescue me from a tower. My life did continue on and even though the reality of there not being a prince charming or a knight in shining armor coming for me on a white horse, I still held out a shred of hope for there to be someone to find me and rescue me from the nightmare of the teenage years. Nope, it never happened. I grew up and went through life in the normal way, getting through as best as I could.
Then one day I realized something miraculous had happened. There was such a thing as a prince charming. I now had the proof because my prince charming walked into my life to rescue me, but he was no prince charming, even though I saw him that way. He did finally appear after much doubt and fear that he would never come to find me and take me away from this house and my siblings. As for what they did and lived happily ever after? They must not have known what it was either, because they did not live happily ever after, and that finally ended her search for her prince charming. She learned that life was just life, and there are good times and bad times and we always figure out how to get through the bad times and we try to remember the good.
cm writes 