Musings du jour

I keep musing about this "who do I want to be" thing. I've had a lot of musing time lately… we had another long day, doctor and then oncologist this morning, then hanging around all day in Rochester killing time until therapist appointments this evening. With the amount that we've been out lately, you'd think that we were actually having an interesting life.

So… when I was 18, this is who I wanted to be

Kelly Capwell. Actually Robin Wright, playing Kelly Capwell on the now-dead soap opera, Santa Barbara. I thought she was the most beautiful thing that I'd ever seen, and I still kind of think that…you know, in that sense of, if you could pick exactly who you wanted to look like, I'd look precisely like that. Tall and thin with long, straight blonde hair. And Kelly's storyline in the beginning of the show (I actually watched this soap opera from the very beginning, and I'm sure that I'm just trashing all my seriousness cred by even talking about this. But I was about 18, ok?) was that she was the very sheltered innocent daughter of this mega-millionaire, something-else Capwell, and she was madly in love with some poor but gorgeous guy who was trying to win the approval of Daddy Capwell, whatever his name was. Yeah, it's an old, old, old and really trite story. But still a good one. And that's who I wanted to be, the fairy princess. Robin Wright was that, too, in The Princess Bride.

I wanted to be the princess, or the ballerina (we were watching a documentary on Russian ballerinas the other night, and Michael said, I didn't think you were interested in this. But of course. When I was 6, I was desperate to be a ballerina and have pointe shoes and a pink tutu. Unfortunately, I was also chubby and uncoordinated, and they don't start you out with the tutu and toe shoes.)

That was before the days of the Disney Princess franchise, and these days, it sounds beyond silly to say that you wanted to be a princess… and it probably did then, too. And I turned out to be the ogre princess, anyway, like Fiona in Shrek. The trouble is, I've never given up wanting to be that princess. Beautiful and thin and blonde and cherished and taken care of. I think because I never had that… a child with too much adulthood too early, a father never really there, a mother occupied with other things, no one to trust or look out for me. Not a sob story there, just a description of reality. So you long for what you don't have.

But here I am. And in some ways, my cherished dream is not any different from what it was when I was 18, although I would never have admitted it, then or now.

So what do you do next when you wanted to be a princess? There's not a lot of alternate dream choices for "failed princess."

Nobody Loves a Fairy When She's Forty.