Disney Fucked Up

I wrote this during a ten hour car ride from the suburbs of D.C. to Hilton Head, South Carolina. My seat-mate was telling me about his mother's early childhood--information I had never known. She had been adopted, with her three other siblings. A surprising amount of information was available to them concerning their biological parents. The information was melancholic. I started feeling emotions. Family is one of the, no, family is the most important thing a person can have. Having no family is bad. Losing family is devastating. So I wrote this intermittently on the way down. It epitomizes what a short story should be. Oddly enough, I wrote it a few days before mother's day. It seemed appropriate.

Disney fucked up.

My mom died when I was four. Four and a half. I have really long hair. I can remember sitting next to her on the couch one morning; I had been swimming in our pool, unattended and I had dried off on an oversized plush pink towel with various sized yellow flower outlined on it. I pulled open the glass door and wandered next to my mom, who was sitting down on the beige sofa we still have. I was really tired. I had stayed up really late the night before, I remember, because this was the first time I started forming memories. I started forming memories because my mom was dying.

And it would have been too easy for me to just not remember my mom. I could have pulled a fucking princess Leia and when Luke asks her if she remembers her own mother, she says something like I remember certain things like her voice. Well Leia, what a bitch, is lying, because her mom, as we learn as George Lucas detours with us through Revenge of the Sith, dies almost immediately after she names her.

You lucky cunt.

I sat next to my mom, kind of cold from the air conditioning. I looked at her, I looked at the television, I looked back at her. I cannot guarantee that this is what actually happened. I've thought about this day so many times that it's been over romanticized like whiskey cocktails or Paris, France. Apologies. I hate both of those things. I hate the way Paris is actually a dump with more dog shit than the shittiest place in America. And I hate the way whiskey actually burns. I'll use it to disinfect wounds on the, also romanticized, American western plains. And I'll use it to brush my teeth, spitefully, if I find myself waking up in a whiskey connoisseur's house. But I can't feel emotions for that one-day, so I don’t know, maybe nothing was romanticized. Maybe all of this did happen, just the way I remember it.

It was a news show. It often was. She put her arm around me. "Mommy, I'm tired," I said, or something like that. She didn't look at me. She just kind of said, she had such a pretty voice: "Your hair's getting long." I nodded, looking at her face. She didn't look at me. "You can cut it," I said, slower, tired. She shook her head. "No kid," she put her hand on the top of my head, and her bracelet kind of got stuck in my ringlets. She had to look at me then, fiddling with her right hand to get her diamonds or pearls out of my hair. I still have the bracelet. It's in the bottom drawer of my jewelry box, the one I got for graduating from high school from my second cousin on my father's side who likes woodworking. I wish I could see a strand of brunette or blonde hair—I was a dirty blonde kid—stuck in one of the sterling silver links that ties the bracelet together. But I've stared at it for moments at a time. Weird moments. The hair must have disintegrated.

She wrested the bracelet from its confines and then she took it off, placing it on the other side of her. She rubbed my head. "I like your hair long. You are my gorgeous little girl," she said it so airily. I wonder if she actually even said it. I fell asleep with my head on her chest, listening to the oxygen flow into and out of her lungs, those fucking lungs that would fail her within six months. Those fucks. And her heart, too. And all the things that made my mom my mom. And she just—leaving me alone and I wonder a lot, though I’ve gotten good at not thinking about it too often, but I still wonder a lot and if people tell you it gets easier, well they must be a lot fucking older than I am now so I just kind of still wonder, why?

And this is why Disney fucked up, because losing my mom didn't make me a better person. It wasn't an experience that I'd learn important lessons from. It wasn't like I would be guided through my teenage years by faeries, or sidekicks, or princesses and princes, only to arrive in my early twenty-something’s an attractive and well-formed individual—competent, strong, married. No. Fuck them. I would live through my teenage years a burden on a father who never knew what to say to me and couldn't live through losing the love of his life. He never even dated again. My dad never cried, but he was always a sad, wretched man after that day in the middle of November. He never moved on, frozen like Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, and he’d never awake. Even if I looked like her, as sometimes he said I did, that recognition only made him despise me, I'm almost certain, as time went on—especially in my teen years. They had met in high school. Don't I look like the girl you first fell in love with, the same girl who just left you for no good reason besides poor genetics? Yes. I'm sure she loved you, but love doesn't mean a fucking thing when all you can really feel are wants and needs.

I loved my mom. I guess. What is love at four and a half? It's attachment. Pathetic. But I needed her to tell me what to do with my hair which always kept growing and which my dad never knew how to cut. I needed her to tell me I was gorgeous when I was five foot five in second grade and all my classmates loved staring at me, questioning the feasibility of my existence, making my height the center of their conversations instead of asking me anything about anything ever so I never knew how to have real conversations with anyone until even today. Stunted. I needed her to tell me not to have sex with boys who hadn’t even asked me out yet, because god knows my dad never would have told me something as simple and pragmatic as that. He couldn’t have. Dads are great. But moms make gorgeous little girls into princesses.

It's Mother's day, I’m twenty-three, and Bambi is fucking impractical.