The Princess and The Queen

My granddaughter turned three last week. When I saw her in her poufy party dress, sparkly pink shoes, pink gloves and little costume jewelry pearls, I had to remind myself to inhale. She simply took my breath away.

Having raised three boys of my own, and having grown up with two brothers, I never experienced the wonder of a little girl turned princess. As a child, my older brother’s outgrown pants became my play clothes and my Buster Brown leather tied school shoes were also my party shoes, just polished up a bit.

When I asked my mother, recently, why she never dressed me up like a princess she told me they couldn’t afford to be frivolous. "Besides," she told me, "those Buster Brown shoes were better for a young child’s developing feet." My mother was frugal and practical – a bad combination for nurturing a little princess.

As I was growing up, my mother told me many stories about the women in her family. One was about her cousin who was always dressed up in frilly clothes and was called “princess” by her father, even after she was married. As a child, she wasn’t allowed to get her pretty clothes dirty when she played outdoors. Later, as a young woman, she would spend hours primping herself to get ready for a date. “So much for being a princess,” my mother told me. “She ended up marrying a bum who smacked her around. And she didn’t have the guts to stand up to him.”

Then there was her aunt, a delicate beauty in the Roaring 20’s, with dark wavy hair who “dressed to the nines” and was very popular with the men. She married a very attractive man who loved to go out dancing at night – without my aunt. She ended up with an indelicate social disease that prevented her from having children and a marriage that ended in divorce. My mother always ended this story with a warning: “Don’t marry a good dancer. He’ll leave you home alone when you’re pregnant and go looking for a good time.”

Then, there was a sister-in-law who ignored her husband when he belittled her and talked down to her in company. She would giggle, as if his nasty comments were humorous. “He gives her nice clothes to wear and treats her like an imbecile,” my mother would say. “Don’t ever let a man treat you that way.”

Back in the 1950's, there was the woman on our block who dressed in tight fitting pencil skirts and high heels, wore makeup and red lipstick every day, and walked with her chin a little higher than the rest of us. Her hair was done up on top of her head, not pushed back with a headband, like my mother’s. We would often look out the front window and catch her striking leggy poses while watering the front lawn with a garden hose. “Who does she think she is?” my mother would say, laughing and imitating her poses, “a princess or something?”

These, and other stories about the women in my family, were the influential anecdotes that shaped my little girl mind. Without lecturing me directly on the subject, my mother was teaching me that the value of a woman lies not in her physical appearance but in her personal strength and knowing who she really is inside. She taught me the importance of standing up for yourself and your integrity – even if it means standing up to a man and the authority he may hold over you. That may not be proper behavior for a princess, but, perhaps, without knowing it, my mother was grooming me for a higher position.

So, when we were studying English History in high school and my best friend asked me one day, “Who would you rather be back then? The princess or the queen?” I answered without a moment’s hesitation.

“The queen,” I said. “Definitely, The Queen.”