A fairy tale for today

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in New York with her mum, dad and new baby brother. This little girl was very naughty and horribly mischievous and would get into trouble as soon as her parents turned their backs.  She was pretty oblivious to her surroundings, as most little children are, and carried on living the playful life of a child for as long as possible.

When the little girl was fiveand started school she learned to communicate in the language of those around her and came to see her own parents as 'foreign'. Sometimes she was very proud of her mum and dad and other times she was embarrassed by their Eastern European ways.  She heard their stories about life in Poland before the war and heard her father crying out in the night sometimes with bad dreams.  She knew that her parents were different to other American mums and dads. She never ate Chinese food with them on Sundays and they never ever had pizza for dinner.  When they wanted to buy her and her brother new
underwear they had to travel all the way to the Lower East Side and go to some musty basement stores on Orchard Street.  They would stop into see other folks just like them who owned fabric stores and she would wait self-consciously while they chatted in Yiddish.

The little girl always felt a bit odd, a bit outside of the crowd.  Her classmates all went trick or treating on Halloween and had barbecued hamburgers on the 4th of July.  She never seemed to have a starring role in school plays and certainly never joined the Brownies or Scouts.

When the girl was ten she seemed to go off the narrow path she had negotiated for years and started petty thieving.  Her parents found out and told her what a disappointment she was to them.  She felt terrible, but also pleased to have so much attention.  At the same time she started coughing - a hacking, loud, barking cough.  Her mum took her to doctors and she had tests and x-rays and they all said the same thing - nothing wrong. The cough lasted for almost a year.  The girl knew something was wrong but she didn't know what.  She started to walk with a one-sided slant. Again her mother took her to doctors and this time they did find something wrong. They called it scoliosis and said that in order to correct it they would need to put the girl into a brace for at least a year. The girl's mum asked what would happen if they did nothing and the doctors said that it would only affect her cosmetically. This seemed unimportant to the mother.  They never asked the girl how she felt. So they did nothing.

The girl was a talented artist and went to a special school for art.  She travelled a long way on her own each day. She was often frightened of the crowds and rush hour chaos but said  nothing.  She liked school and made friends but they never came to her house. Her parents didn't understand why anyone might want to sleep over at a friend's house when they had perfectly good beds at home.  She was lonely and had lots of headaches. She always did well at school and her parents were pleased when she was accepted to the local university.  They would never let her leave home to go to university.

At university the girl was one of the youngest students and for the first year she worked very hard but was very unhappy.  The second year she derailed.  She made the wrong friends and acted out in all sorts of bad ways.  Her parents never noticed. The girl would come home from college and shut herself into her room.  It wasn't really her room since she had to share it with her brother. She acted out in more bad ways and one day her parents had no choice but to notice.  Again, they were very disappointed.  The girl was pleased that she was getting some attention.

All of this happened to the girl in the first 17 years of her life.  It is not a great story up until that time and even for a few years afterwards the girl, now a woman, did not have an easy time. She had no understanding of the concept of 'easy'.

Now the girl is all grown up and reading her own story still feels sad for the unnoticed little girl in the story who sometimes surfaces and still needs lots of attention. The girl has not yet understood how to make things easy for herself.  Sad.