A Fairy-Tale Romance

Another week and another post born out of my own confusion!

First off, though, I want to address something I wrote here last month… It was in a paid post, so maybe you didn’t even see it, but basically I was saying that for x, y, and z reasons, I hadn’t felt like writing for the Substack.

I then followed that post up one week later with a post. And then the following week? Another post. Ha. What I’m now realizing is what I didn’t feel like doing was work on Resume Gap (an old project that I’ve been sharing here). What I did feel like doing was writing about me now, trying to understand myself, and specifically my feelings about this exact current political moment. 

Which brings us to today’s post. Hi.

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Illustration detail from the Brothers-Grimm fairy tale, “The Frog Prince”

So, this past week, everyone got sick. It wasn’t your normal cold. The main symptom was fever/ouch-my-skin-hurts/chills. The bonus symptoms were a cough and runny nose. (It wasn’t Covid.) Isaac, our seven-year-old, fell first (and recovered first). Then, it was me and Teddy (our nine-year-old). During this period, when Isaac was seemingly back to normal but Teddy and I were still sick, Matt was doing the most. He was making dinner, filling waters, and putting everyone to bed. But then, twenty-four hours later, Teddy had recovered and Matt fell, leaving me, still with the fever/chills combination but also: the healthiest adult family member.

What version of yourself shows up when you’re suffering and yet, you have to put other people ahead of yourself—ahead of your own pain? I ask because I’m betting that your version is much kinder and more patient than mine, which I might describe as duty-bound, at best, and straight-up resentful, at worst.

I don’t remember exactly what my younger son did that pushed me over the edge while I was in this state (physically sick and full of resentment), but I remember it was after I’d cleared the sink of the lunch dishes, after I’d started the water boiling for the mac and cheese, after I’d taken out the overflowing trash and recycling and experienced that wave of heat/nausea move through my body. It might’ve been him saying, “I don’t want mac and cheese,” the moment I set the bowl down and well after I’d confirmed with him that that was something he might deign to eat. What I do remember is yelling at him in a semi-unhinged way.

What usually happens next, after I’ve yelled at my kids in a scary fashion (and once I’ve calmed back down) is that I feel bad. And even after I’ve apologized to them (something that, needless to say (?), didn’t happen in, ahem, my own childhood) and everything seems to be back to normal, I’m typically left with this feeling of: Why am I like this? Am I a bad person? (Merve Emre doesn’t do this and she writes for the New Yorker!¹)

The following morning, these questions were still hanging around. And so, I did what I usually do: I began writing.

When I got to this part—the domestic scene of a woman screaming—I paused to consider a gif or some image I might be able to insert so that you could have a visual for the kind of person I was/am in these moments. Quickly, I thought of the mean old woman character from Spirited Away.

But then as soon as I thought of her, I questioned my memory. But isn’t she also nice?  

The problem was that as many times as I’ve “seen” Spirited Away, it’s always been in bits and pieces, catching scenes here and there as my kids watched it from beginning to end. And so, that night, curious about the whole story, I suggested a “family movie night,” followed by my specific pitch for Spirited Away. After some light pushback from Teddy, I triumphed.

We got through about half of it before it was bedtime, but I’d watched enough to meet the old woman character that had surfaced to the fore of my mind. Her name is Yubaba and she runs the bathhouse where most of the action in Spirited Away takes place. In one amazing scene, the main character—a ten-year-old girl named Chihiro—has to ask Yubaba for a job, and since Yubaba took an oath to give a job to anyone who asks, she has to do it. #dutybound

But before conceding any of this information, the old woman/ business owner/ mother throws a giant, scary fit. She trashes her own office. She grabs Chihiro by the neck. And yet, the young girl stands her ground, and Yubaba finally relents. She uses magic to float a job contract to Chihiro while also putting her trashed room back together, Mary Poppins-style. Then, (my favorite part) the mean old woman very quietly, almost under her breath, says: “I hate being so nice all the time.”

Fast forward to the next morning: I’m back at my desk, still feeling bad about my behavior, except now, it’s not only my behavior toward my kids. I’m feeling bad about my general behavior in this one life. I’m asking myself: Why do I have to take things so far? Why can’t I be more chill? Why can’t I hold it together?

I tried to keep writing about it, but it wasn’t making sense. I closed that Word document and opened up a different one. I’d been working on another essay lately, one about reading “Hansel and Gretel”—the Brothers-Grimm version of the tale—with my kids.

Because I’d been working on it off and on, I had my purple-cloth-bound copy of The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm right there on my desk as reference. And if you’ve been reading along here, you already know that I value the work of Carl Jung and how Jungians rely on old stories to understand the complexities of human psychology. And so, looking for understanding, I cracked the book open and began reading the very first story in the collection: The Frog Prince.

You are almost certainly familiar with parts of this fairy tale, as this is the one from which sprang the popular saying: You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince. But amazingly (to me, at least), as I read the Brothers-Grimm version, the princess never kisses the frog.

Here’s a very abridged version of the whole story: A princess is playing with her beloved golden ball by a lake and accidentally lets it fall into the pool of water. A frog emerges and cuts a deal with the princess. I will get your ball, he says, if you “would be fond of me, and cherish me, and if I were your friend and playmate…” The frog’s description goes on, but it’s pretty intense. In exchange for retrieving the ball, he basically wants to be best friends with the princess.

Loving her dagger, btw

Aloud, the princess is like: OK, GREAT! GET MY BALL PLZ, while inwardly she is thinking: This frog is crazy.

So, the second the frog retrieves her ball, she takes it and runs off with it. She doesn’t pause to be fond of the frog, let alone cherish him.

But then, the next day, the frog shows up at the castle, demanding fondness!

The princess runs away, only for her father, the king, to ask her what’s going on. When she tells him the story, he commands her to keep her end of the deal.

She obeys her dad and lets the frog in, but the frog won’t be satisfied until he’s sitting at the table with her and eating from her same golden plate. Once he’s had his fill of food, he is ready to go to sleep and wants the princess to carry him up to bed. The princess cries, disgusted by the very idea, but again the king holds her to her promise.

She’s grossed out. She holds him “between her two fingers” and drops him in the corner of her room. But he wants to sleep right next to her in her own bed. He threatens to tell her father if she doesn’t acquiesce. Here’s what happens next:

But with this last demand she got mighty angry and snatched him up and hurled him with all her strength against the wall. ‘Now you can sleep as deeply as you like, you horrid frog!’ Yet as he landed, he ceased to be a frog. Instead he became a prince with kind and winning eyes.

To which I responded: Say what now? She threw him against the wall?

The story wasn’t over though, so I kept reading, hoping for some kind of explanation, but the closest it comes is when the prince/ex-frog explains to the princess that he’d been cursed by an “evil witch” and that only she, the princess, could “dissolve this spell and free him.” We don’t get anything else from the princess’s point of view. The next few paragraphs describe the new couple taking a carriage ride to the prince’s kingdom, presumably to get married.

The end.

I was so confused. I had questions, like: why had I never heard this version before? And also, how is it that something good could come out of this moment of violence?  

And so, I took my confusion to my parents the hosts of This Jungian Life. I searched for an episode in which they discuss The Frog Prince and found it. The episode is titled “The Art & Practice of B*tchiness.”

“I love this story,” one of the hosts (Lisa Marchiano) says, after retelling the same version of the fairy tale I’d just read,

because it says that you have to be willing to sacrifice your nice, princess persona. And you know, it’s actually hard to sacrifice a princess persona because women get a lot of positive feedback for being the agreeable, pretty princess. And when you’re the agreeable pretty princess, you get to go around feeling sort of secretly smug, secretly superior because you’re nicer than everyone else. So this involves really looking at yourself and recognizing that you can be a bitch... And really claiming that.

While this made sense to me (and brought with it some uncomfortable truths of my own about being a bitch and not owning it), it didn’t quite address the good thing that came out of the princess’s bitchiness: the breaking of the curse.

And then, in the very next breath, and in a moment that Jung might have called synchronicity, the male host brings up Spirited Away. He describes the mean old woman (Yubaba) as fitting into this archetype of the bitch. He refers to her as a “ferocious witch” and how in working for her, Chihiro (like the frog) changes.

In his words, because of Yubaba, Chihiro “learns about power and responsibility and meticulousness and excellence and discernment…”

I can’t tell you how good it felt to hear this. Not that it excused or will excuse me screaming at my kids every time they push the boundaries of what I think is acceptable behavior. But to think that maybe sometimes, this kind of response—one of big feelings and intensity, one lacking in patience and kindness—isn’t without its merits.

That night, as Matt washed the dinner dishes (thank you, Matt), the kids and I got in bed and finished the rest of Spirited Away.

As I watched the second half, I understood why my initial memory of Yubaba wasn’t all bad. It’s because in the second part of the movie, we meet her identical twin sister, Zeniba. So much happens in this movie and it’s such a pleasure to watch that I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Yubaba’s twin, Zeniba, turns out to be, if not straightforwardly good, better than Yubaba.

In the last ten minutes or so, Chihiro takes a train to Zeniba’s house.

Chihiro on the train with No-Face

Zeniba lets Chihiro and her travel companions in. “Sit down. I’ll make some tea,” she says—wearing the exact same dress and jewelry as her twin sister does.

As they drink their tea and eat some delicious-looking snacks, Zeniba keeps talking: “I don’t get along with my sister. She’s so obnoxious. You saw how tacky her home is. We’re identical twins but exact opposites.”

And even though Chihiro’s problems are not yet solved, after all of the turmoil and stress that came before, this scene feels so incredibly cozy. Zeniba is even teaching Chihiro’s companions how to knit!

Zeniba as knitting instructor.

It feels like everything is going to be okay. Zeniba tells Chihiro to call her Granny, and she does.

Fast forward to a few scenes later when Chihiro is reunited with Yubaba, the ferocious witch, who puts her through one final test. And when Chihiro passes, what does she call Yubaba? Granny.

It feels very clear in that moment, after Chihiro has called both sisters “Granny,” that the identical twins are actually two sides of the same person. That the evil witch is the Granny a.k.a. “the good mother.” And vice versa, that “the good mother” is also the evil witch.

Maybe you knew all of this already? That people are complicated. That princesses can be bitches. That frogs can be princes. That no one is one-hundred-percent good nor the reverse.

But I had to be reminded. And then I had to write 2k words about it and post it on the Internet.

Xxoxx Amelia

1. This is kind of a deep cut, but I’ve written about my displeasure over Merve Emre’s book review of a book titled Mom Rage.