It was the summer before my senior year of high school.  I bought a bus ticket to Michigan, where “the man of my dreams” — we’ll call him Leon — lived.  We had met online several months earlier, and he had come out to visit me in Connecticut for Christmas and New Year’s Eve.  We didn’t get to spend New Year’s Eve together; I spent the transition from 1999 to 2000 in my bedroom, grounded and furious.  Leon’s the person who bought me the Hot Damn that I got drunk off for my 17th birthday.

What he hadn’t told me, and what I discovered soon after arriving in Michigan, is that he, at 24, lived in his parent’s basement.  He also hadn’t told his parents that I was visiting, never mind planning to move in.  This was not the first of his deceptions, and certainly not the last.

My dad and I

As I’ve written before, if I have any “relationship” with my father at all, it’s a frail, tempestuous one.  And while I take personal responsibility for my actions, I also can’t deny that I — that any person — is shaped by their life experiences, and that includes what he’s done to me.  So when I say that I felt adrift, confused, and completely abandoned by him, and when I say that those feelings are part of what contributed to me seeking out some man to love me, some man to fill that void in my heart left by him, I know that I have every right to it.  And Leon happened to be the first man that came along.

However, something else contributed to me seeking out a man to save me: Disney. I grew up in the Golden Age of Disney movies, when they were all still musicals featuring beautiful, spirited princesses who somehow nonetheless were incomplete until they found their man.  I remember seeing The Little Mermaid in the theatres with my mom, and both of us crying at the end when Ariel gets married, hugs her father, and whispers, “I love you, Daddy“.  I remember watching Belle finding true love as she kissed The Beast.  I remember Jasmine crying out, “I am not a prize to be won!” and then, dressed in fiery red scraps, being rescued from the evil Jafar by a daring Aladdin.

I grew up — so many women grow up — with the concept that someday my prince will come and rescue me pounded into their heads.  This isn’t even a subtle message.  It’s the plot line of our youth.  I just looked through this list of Disney animated movies and the number of them I loved where that storyline is implemented is staggering.  There is no denying that I believed my prince was out there, searching for me as I searched for him.

Again, let me say that I take responsibility for what I did.  I’m not writing that I ran away because of my father and Disney, but I am writing that having those two influences in my life has shaped me as a person.  The person, the teenager, I was, was not a wise enough girl to look inside herself, find the strength nurtured by all the positive influences on her life, and abandon the idea that she needed to be rescued.

Now, as a mother, clearly I worry about my daughter.  I look at her in Chris’ arms and think, “You are the first man she’s in love with. Don’t break her heart.“  I hold her in my own arms, nursing her, our bodies two separate entities now and yet still so completely dependent on each other, and think, “Make your own mistakes. Don’t make mine.“  She will make mistakes.  She will have her heart broken.  She will break mine.  But I can’t stomach the thought of her doing the same things I did.  When I imagine her being as weak as I was, nausea rises in my throat.  I think of someone treating her the way Leon treated me and a primal, irrational fury consumes me, the need to protect her burning so strongly at the very core of my being that I would face anything, anything, to keep her from that anguish.

So when I saw this feature in JPG Magazine called “Fallen Princesses”, where a photographer took the stories of Cinderella, Snow White, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood, then looked at them in a modern, post-fairy tale light, it really resonated with me. Now that I’m more than a decade removed from Disney’s target audience, and I’ve come into my own, I look at those images and nod.

Cinderella in a bar, despondent, staring at a shot glass and being eyed askance by a pair of rough-and-tumble men, the type you expect to see hanging out in a place like that during the day.

Snow White, barefoot and surrounded by her own little dwarves, her mask of resignation unable to hide the desperate look in her eyes that cries, “Yes, this is my fairy tale ending — is it yours?”

Belle, lying with eyes closed, hands clasped, on a surgery table, bloody stitches crowning her hairline, a needle penetrating her grotesque lips and a scalpel carving her face.

On and on.

Yet at the end of Disney movies comes a happily ever after, doesn’t it?

When you find your prince, you find meaning in life, don’t you?

It’d be nice if those things were true.  They aren’t.  I thought they were.  I made ignorant decisions and I hurt my family.  I did these things because I genuinely believed that love conquers all, that love is easy and, if I just pursued my prince, everything else in my life would fall into place.  I don’t want to tell Maia she can’t watch Disney movies.  I love the thought of her dressing up as a princess and inventing her own fairy tales.

I just hope she comes to understand that there’s a reason they’re called “fairy tales” sooner than I did.