Into The Dark Woods Of Childhood

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
Albert Einstein

Fairytalelife. For a while she vanished.

It was a tough end of the year for me so I've taken some much-needed time off to recover. I've been thinking a lot about my time on steemit, and I decided write my first post of the new year explaining a little bit about how @fairytalelife came to be.

When you see the name @fairytalelife, I'm sure images of castles, thwarted princesses, enchanted frogs, and evil witches come to mind. They do for me too. But taking a closer look, my steemit name is so much more.

Why this fascination with fairy tales?

I've written about this before in bits and pieces. Or I should say I've let some clues slip out.

This new year for me is about finally accepting who I am and where I come from. It's hard to do. I've held it in for a long time, but it's my story. I guess you could say these are the skeletons in my closet.

Let's just say there were no fairies at my christening.

The real reason behind my name is this. Fairy tales were an escape from my traumatic childhood. If my parents were screaming at each other, or my father was raging around the house drunk, I had my room and my fairy tale records that provided a safe sanctuary. Yes, there were villains in these stories. But there were villains outside my door who were supposed to be responsible for my wellbeing. The fictional world of justice in these tales made me feel less alone because the bad people were punished, the protagonists overcame their challenges, and goodness prevailed. The characters I related to best of all were the children who felt abandoned and sold out so that their parents could have a better life.

Hansel and Gretel overheard their parents plot to abandon them in the forest where they'd be exposed to all kinds of dangers. It was the stepmother's idea. The evil stepmother. The father did not object much. He went along with her plan.

Much later when I researched the origins of these tales (which were never meant for children), I learned that part of the sanitation process to lighten them up in the mid 19th century required changing the biological mother into a depraved stepmother. It was too difficult to fathom a "real" mother behaving this way towards her own children. Was it more tolerable to have a stepmother abusing her stepchildren? More to be expected? I often felt my own mother was a wicked stepmother. That explained everything. Some mothers do atrocious things to their children, biological or step.

This still left the question - why did the father agree with such a horrific plot to dispose of his own children? I ask that now as a parent myself. As a child, I believed my own father would have no trouble sending me away in to the woods.

Perhaps fairy tales serve a deeper purpose than a simple bedtime story. To a child, the world can be a scary place. Fairy tales help put these things in perspective using a language of make believe children are hardwired to accept. And I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Einstein.

For me, my childhood was about self-preservation and survival. I got really good at reading people and picking up on tension around me. I became acutely attuned to which one of my parents would have a meltdown first, and I learned how to become scarce and disappear until the storm subsided. This was when I opened my drawing pad to escape the chaos and fear. I drew obsessively. Then I painted. And I painted some more. And I got good at it. Drawing was my form of survival. I had to inhabit another world in order to shut out the one I lived in. It was the only sense of control I had.

Since I was an only child, I had no one to protect me from the volatility at home. As far as the outside world could tell I had a fabulous childhood. My parents were funny and so cool. How lucky I was. The façade was impenetrable. Over the years, their fabricated illusion of our perfect family took its toll. My parents are divorced, I haven't spoken to my father in 16 years, and my adult relationship with my mother is estranged.

I always knew things were off at home. It felt like I was living through the looking glass, where nothing was as it seemed, and everything I thought was real wasn't. I was a possession that was supposed to reflect back my parents' warped sense of their own greatness.

Fairy tales gave me hope. Fairy tales encouraged fantasies of justice when I was invisible and unheard. The most miserable life conditions, no matter how bad, could be overcome. Despite debilitating circumstances, there was always a possibility for a happy ending. I had to hold on to that hope.

My happy ending was that I grew up and escaped the control and abuse of a violent household. Had it not been for the glorious world of make believe and the imagination required to absorb these tales, I might not be alive today. I could just as easily have taken a path of self-destruction.

I don't dwell on what happened to me. I wouldn't be who I am today had I not gone through it. I'm stronger and have done a pretty good job of people housecleaning - that is, cutting people out of my life who bring me down. And yes, some are immediate family. I am fortunate to now have a life filled with exceptional people who support and believe in me, and I in them.

I am not my past, but my past makes up a big part of me. It does for all of us. Either we stay stuck or we break free from the legacy of dysfunction others created. We can overcome the bad stories we grew up with by writing our own new ones. We don't need to follow anyone else's scripts.

And happily ever after to me means living a life being kind to others.

That's what my fairy godmother taught me.

Illustrations ©Johanna Westerman 2017