It had been a typical summer’s day. A ballet dress had been worn, ballet shoes traded back and forth with plastic Disney Princess slippers, magic wands had been waved tenfold and dreams of castles, being kissed by Princes and magic kingdoms had been acted out every hour. And so it was that through a curious set of errands, the pre-schooler and I found ourselves in a North Beach park at 7.30 in the evening, sharing the swings and slides with another little girl and her parents. North Beach is an affluent neighborhood, and I could tell by the tailoring of his chinos, the quality of his suede driving shoes and the friendly-yet-assured cut of his jib that the other Dad was not short of a buck. I also ascertained him to be approximately three years into fatherhood, given the age of his daughter and the fact that no older siblings were mentioned. Indeed, he seemed alarmed for a few seconds after I told him about the teenager. I’d like to think this was because I simply don’t look old enough to have fathered a 17 year old…sigh…
…Anyway. As we stood side-by-side, pushing the kids in their swings, the pre-schooler started singing that she was ‘Princess Aurora’ over and over, before telling the girl that she could be Princess Jasmine.
“Has the Princess phase hit your house yet?” I chuckled.
“No,” he replied firmly with a smile, “we don’t let that stuff in our house so it hasn’t come up yet…although the birthday parties are getting more and more…”
I smiled at him. And then I felt the overwhelming urge to say to him, “listen guy, here’s my number, let’s me and you get together over some whiskies and I can actually fucking well explain to you EXACTLY what’s around the corner, because Buddy-boy, you can run but you cannot fucking hide from the filthy treacherous empire of commerce that is D-I-S-N-E-Y. They’ll get you where you least expect it, a napkin here, a birthday there, a fucking sticker on a fucking cereal box in the fucking supermarket, and then if you have the misfortune to be in a shopping mall and pass a store whose doorway is a big fuck-off pair of mouse ears, then Buddy -boy, shove your fingers in your ears and go LALALALALALA because you are about to be nudged and kneaded in the hope of purchasing a few tons of bright plastic and chiffon. And that before you know it, she will be wandering the halls of your home, clicking and clacking like a flamenco dancer, wearing an acre of blue or pink chiffon and wanting to “play Princesses” or “be kissed by the Prince” every 5 seconds or getting whiney because she can’t wear the whole get-up to bed…
I wanted to tell him that he will, one-day, sit and daydream about walking the streets with a large and very aggressive chainsaw, destroying any hint of Disney Princesses he sees, screaming like a warrior who has slain his enemy as bits of plastic and fake blonde hair fly from the teeth of his reverberating blade…I wanted to tell him that he will, as he reads Cinderella for the hundredth time, secretly edit himself from changing the story to accommodate a different ending, where Cinderella actually turns around and says that she thinks the idea of wearing glass slippers is retarded and very very dangerous, smashes them with a large, ball-pin hammer, and shouts that she would much rather wear a decent pair of sneakers and meet a guy who looks real as opposed to this John Fucking Tesch in a monkey suit looking motherfucker who keeps turning up outside her door!!!
I wanted to tell him that he will have to make sure his daughter straddles the line between enjoying princess stories and thinking that unless she looks like some dodgy Disneyfied tart she is “not pretty.” I tackled this a while ago with a large degree of success, pointing out that anyone who’s nice can be a princess, that they don’t all have to look like some emaciated mutant hybrid of Paris Hilton and Madonna who’s voice never changes. And I wanted to tell him that however successful said-explanations might be, he will still have to wrestle the tiarras and shitty plastic shoes and crap plastic jewellery from her person more often than not.
I also wanted to tell him that not all girls hit the princess phase, but unless you live in the middle of an Amish community, in fact, unless you are an Amish…or a hippy…or a cult member who only allows your children to mix with others exactly like your own so as they can all jolly off together when they’re 19 to meet their ‘creator’ (in which case you’d be better off soaking them in Disney you twisted bastard) then your little girl will discover princesses. And she will enjoy them. And you will pray it’s a phase, and you will play the dutiful father and deal with the phase because that’s what we do…and it could be worse, it could be fucking Barbie; indeed, maybe it IS fucking Barbie, in which case commiserations to YOU Sir!
And I wanted to tell him, here’s the deal. Whatever the hairy-toed new-age sages of sensitivity tell you, boys gravitate towards a ‘weapon’ phase and girls gravitate towards a ‘girly’ phase. The teenager, who has no desire to own a gun let alone shoot one, made machine guns out of sticks when I tried to stop him from ‘gun-play’ back in the days I was a hairy-toed sensitive guy. And understanding it doesn’t mean you necessarily indulge it to their hearts content, it simply means you have to know it’s coming, you have to allow a little bit of it and you have to explain how it works in a gentle fashion which doesn’t completely blow their fun before they’re 5 (they’ve got years of that bullshit coming from schools and rules and fools around them as they squeeze into adulthood). Because like TV, if you shut it down ‘no-no-full-stop’ style now, when they get half a chance they’ll be all over that sucker and won’t let it go. Ever. No, its about moderation, however hard it is to tolerate some of this (frankly) obnoxious shite. Besides, nothing sucks harder than being the kid at the birthday party who doesn’t know who Princess Aurora is, or who never played ‘dress-up’ before.
Yeah, I wanted to tell him all of that as we stood side-by-side, pushing our girls in their swings. But he seemed like a good guy and besides, I didn’t have the fortitude to get into it. He’ll find out soon enough. And he’ll deal with. And he’ll survive (I hope)…as long as he (in turn) knows it’s OK to occasionally dream of chainsaws…
