Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time

I’ve turned the page on my storytelling.

The other day my grand-daughters (age 4 and 2) begged me to tell them bedtime stories. Oh, what fun! I have an arsenal of fairy tales inside me. Drawing on one of my own childhood favorites, Little Red Riding Hood, I quickly had the girls engrossed.

As the tale escalated, so did my panic. Let me explain. The girls’ parents are vigilant to protect them from the harsh realities of the world. They don’t have television and ‘hate’ is a bad word in their home.

Two innocent faces stared up at me with big eager eyes. And here I was on the verge of planting an indelible violent scene of a ferocious wolf devouring poor sick helpless grandma. Thinking quickly, I had the wolf lock grandma in the closet but before I could help it, in busted the ‘kind’ woodsman brandishing a razor sharp ax eager to cut the head off of the wolf. Well, I just talked fast and rushed through the murder hoping the girls wouldn’t register it and “then everyone sat down to eat plum cakes and tea and lived happily ever after” (except the wolf, of course).

Hoping to get that nightmare fodder out of their precious little minds, I quickly began another story, Jack and the Beanstalk. Soon I was out of the frying pan and into the fire. First, I felt bad telling them that Jacks mother screamed at him for selling their cow for some ‘stupid magic beans’ when they were both starving to death. Then I worried that my daughter would later call me when her girls were running around shouting the cannibalistic Ogre’s refrain, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make me bread!”

Oh dear, I didn’t remember bedtime stories being this difficult when I told them to my children.

My tempo got faster and faster as I realized this entire story was void of any redeeming value whatsoever. Jack unjustly steals the Ogre’s magic harp and when the Ogre tries to retrieve what is rightfully his, Jack sends him hurling down, down, down, to the earth to meet his violent death, leaving the kind Ogre's wife to mourn out her days as a widow. Why hadn’t I been cognizant of these stories before now?

In my college children’s literature class, I remember learning that fairy tales were originally intended for adult audiences as parlor entertainment. Not until the 19^th and 20^th centuries did they become adapted for children.

You won’t believe what I did next. Yes, yes, three’s a charm. I pulled yet another made-for-adults-but-used-to-terrify-children story out of my repertoire and began Hansel and Gretel. I’ll spare you the retelling and just give you the gruesome bullet points:

• Kids mother dies
• Dad marries wicked stepmother
• Family is starving
• Stepmother devises a plan to abandon children in dark scary forest
• Children find a witch’s house
• Witch locks up boy intending to fatten him to eat later
• Sister forced into slavery
• Sister burns witch in oven

Can somebody please tell me why my mother read me those #hannibalstories? And why did I tell them to my children?  What stories are parents telling their children nowadays? 

I emailed my daughter and assured her that I had just ordered a copy of Aesop’s Fables from Amazon and she was safe to bring the girls over again.