"happily ever after"

It seems to have begun. My daughter, not yet three, is exhibiting initial signs of the downward descent (my perspective) into the Princess Phase. She seems to have resisted, in her own busy tomboy way, so far, but for the past week or two, she's been pretty fixated on Cinderella. She found a Cinderella book on her bookshelf (no idea how it got there!), which has been added to the permanent rotation of nighttime reads. She usually gets three books, and Cinderella's been a fixture for, as I say, about 10 to 12 days now.
*sigh*
Why is this bad, you ask? Well, I definitely don't align myself with the more typical ranty feminist types, but I just hate the idea of my daughter ALREADY being sold the bill of goods about 'life beginning when you get married.' I don't remember being told this explicitly. Maybe it's hard-wired into little girls' psyches to some degree. Nature, or nurture? Or both? Who knows. I don't want my little girl to be anti-marriage, certainly. I hope her mommy and daddy's unmarried stint doesn't warp her perspective on the whole deal later. But I have to try not to gag when I have little mid-book conversations like this one (she's quite a one for the conceptualizing):

"What happened?"
"Well, Honey, Cinderella's stepsisters tore her dress."
"Why is she sad?"
"She doesn't have a pretty dress, so now she can't go to the dance."

I mean, REALLY. So WHAT. (full disclosure -- I never went to any of the formal wear/date-required dances in high school. I just wasn't socially ready.)

I keep rooting for Cinderella to buck up, put on her workaday clothes and hoof it to the ball AS IS.
Hey, if that prince really will love her for who she is, who cares if her hair is swept into an up-do? Or if she has glass slippers. (ewww, aren't there breakage possibilities here? Nothing like a shard of glass in the foot to make you hate life.)

And don't even get me started on the whole Fairy Godmother concept.

For now, I guess I'll let my little girl be a little girl, and take whatever she will from it. We can try to repair the damage later.
I have much to learn about parenting. I suspect letting her go, and figure things out for herself, will be my greatest challenge (and failure). I wonder if it's harder, at this stage, when I don't have any solid evidence to work from that my daughter will be a sensible teen and adult -- only fears based on the worst of what I see around me. I take such comfort from folks such as the Lightfamily (I would link to you, but I'm not sure which button that is yet -- most of us know who you are) who obviously have raised healthy, curious, sensible kids who appear fully capable of (and eager to) rationally process things for themselves. I'll keep taking furtive notes on how they achieved this miracle. I suspect no small mountain of prayer was involved, but since they seem like pretty awesome people themselves (Mr. and Mrs. Light), that's gotta be important, too.

One thing that makes me feel a bit better about Cinderella, somehow, was reading Jeffrey Maguire's "Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister."
He seems to love to turn these classic fairy tales on their heads -- then again, most of them started out being quite a bit different than Mr. Disney re-imagined them, as it is. So maybe they're veering back to the truth in Maguire's books. She seems like kind of a fluffhead in his book. All looks, not a huge amount of brain. Harmless, but hardly the perfect chica. Whereas Ugly Stepsister No. 2 has tons of brains and sensibility, but is quite plain and possibly ugly. (Stepsis No. 1 is large, ungainly and mentally deficient. but also fairly harmless, as I recall.) I don't recommend his stuff if you're attached to the original story. I keep hearing that "Wicked" is his real masterpiece, but I don't want The Wizard of Oz tainted for me.

Then one evening, Lizzy will want to watch Lilo and Stitch again, and I'll be back to worrying that she'll decide to hide in the dryer someday. :) With me, it's always something, when it comes to Lizzy. And almost always something inconsequential. So I'll keep trying to worry only about today's worries, which are few, and leave tomorrow's worries to themselves. Since they don't often seem to materialize, anyway.