Why We Shouldn’t Read Cinderella to Our Children

Growing up, my sisters and I were the first ones on the bus to school and the last ones off. We spent a lot of time in tractors as my parents worked. There was lots of riding around time before being big enough to drive anything. We did a lot of reading. I love reading. Maybe it’s just the books I choose, but most of them go the same way. The classic Cinderella story — boy meet girl, fall in love, have a huge problem that gets fixed, then they live happily ever after. So few of these stories talk about life after marriage. It ends with the happily ever after.

Maybe it’s just ours, but marriage is hard. Not just hard, but freaking hard. Every single day is work. I’m a very imperfect being and I’m married to an imperfect being. Why do we read our children stories of happily ever afters being easy? Nothing about marriage is easy. Little girls dream of their wedding day for years. We plan everything out. Every wedding we go to, we can’t wait to be the girl in the cliche white dress. We want to have our day. The day everyone is cerebrating us and our princes. Then the happily ever begins.

The socks get left all over the house, the toothpaste is left in the sink, the toilet paper is never replaced, dishes don’t make their way to the dishwasher, laundry piles up, the floor always needs swept and bills, bills, bills.

I hope you grew up in a home that your parents modeled how to navigate all this and communicate effectively, but I’m going to guess with the divorce rate the way it is, there are several of us that weren’t taught how to navigate the happily ever after.

We think that the wedding is the biggest day of our life and that is simply not true. Our stories do not end with the wedding day like the stories do. Our story begins with the wedding day. We shouldn’t disillusion our children that marriage is easy. I’m not a parent. I’m an aunt that loves my nieces and nephews to pieces. But I am not a parent. Period. I cannot and will not tell you how to raise your children.

Should we become parents someday, our babies will be taught that the happily ever after doesn’t exist. Period end of subject. Does not exist. Everyday is a struggle. Everyday is a choice. Life is not a fairy tale.

Does that mean our hypothetical babies won’t believe in love stories. Absolutely not. My hope is that we model real and true life. We model good days where things go smooth and smiles and good attitudes are easy. I hope we model bad days where frowns and bad attitudes are present. I hope we model sad days that tears flow freely. But most of all I hope that our still hypothetical babies see that their parents aren’t living a fairy tale. They are living the life that we chose. Everyday is a choice. Everyday is a day that we wake up and decide that no matter what goes on, we will love each other through it and work through any and all problems together.

We can’t and won’t tell you how to raise your children, but I strongly encourage you to be real with your children and not disillusion them with fake stories that sound good in story books, but don’t work in real life.

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