The Real Life Fairy Tale

My Fairy Tale.

My Prince Charming.

I found it guys. I found him. I finally found him. And, what’s more? I said those words. The words I heard so many times and depending on my mood I either swooned or winced. “I’ll come back, I’ll always come back”.

“Don’t go”. “Stay with me” I heard those words too. Said to me. Can you believe it? Every night I wrestle with myself, and just like in any good story, I tell myself that this is what’s best for both of us. If I don’t get a few hours of sleep, I will not be worth anything for either one of us. But those words are like out of a fairy tale. Aren’t they? “Don’t go mom, stay with me”. My answer, “I’ll come back, baby, I always come back for you”. And tonight in an effort to calm him down and engage him I went a little further. I told him that no matter where he is and what he does in his life I will always come back for him. He said, “Yeah just like when I go to school and you come back to take me home, you always come back”.

“And I always will”.

And there it is. My fairy tale. I imagined my Prince Charming to be handsome but who knew he would be so cute that I would want to just eat him up with a spoon. Just don’t tell my older one that his snotty little brother got a whole post about being Prince Charming and this tale has some chance of staying fairy.

Im obsessed with fairy tales yet I never really wanted a prince. Im not sure what I wanted. Maybe I never wanted a prince because I knew there is no such thing in real life so I knew not wanting one was in my best interest. When I got married everyone told me that I had found mine. I was happy but wasn’t sure what I had found, because it doesn’t look like the movies in real life. In real life, it looks very real and the things that are endearing onscreen can be a real pain in the behind in real life. So, I thought yeah this is it. Case closed, fairy tales don’t exist. Of course they don’t exist. I mean yeah, I always knew that. That should not have been a surprise. Right? It wasn’t.

All we want our prince to do is save us. Save us from the everydayness of our lives. We expect them to take us in fantasies. We expect them to take us in lands that are new and exciting. We expect them to show us worlds that we never thought existed. All of that is so clear all of a sudden that it can be seen and had in so many different ways. My kids have made me smile in the worst of times and delivered me from the darkest of phases.

No other human could have done that for me. They have been my strength and my weakness all at the same time. And the worlds I have imagined with them, the fantasies they have shown me are unbelievable. Kids do come up with better fantasies than anything any adults could ever come up with.

Sure, there is a lot of unpleasant things to deal with but it’s not a bad trade at times when you can share a laugh with your prince when he comes running to you naked telling you to dress him because his dad ran away (run away dad, that could be a whole another blog). You are tired and you had handed him over to his dad because you wanted some time to your self. However, he came looking for you. He wanted you. That is special. No matter how tired and annoyed, that puts a smile on your face.

In the end I ended up with not one but two handsome princes, Fairy tales DO exist. Life gets you in surprising little ways and gives you little things that you secretly dream of that you thought you would never have.