Saturday, October 1, 2016

Those Dang Boxes

From a young age I was told that one of the rewards for being a good girl was that someday I would find a Prince Charming who valued "good." Good as in sugar and spice and everything nice, sweet but not tart, accommodating and non-confrontational, submissive, dedicated to domestic duties, feminine with a little pinch of seductive but not promiscuous, and lastly, good as in never ever doing the nasty, nasty before marriage. Princes like for their fair maidens to be untouched by other princes on their wedding night, ya know.

I could be all of those things that when added together would equal "good," but yet I still, in the core of me, believed I was bad. And I didn't like myself much for the bad in me. Where did that come from I wonder?  Oh, could it be that that was the message that repeated itself over and over from the age of five to twelve?
At twelve I escaped the bearer of "bad" news. But I carried that dang "I'm Bad" box with me into my teenage years. Oh, yes, my wonderful teenage years; the ugly years, ages thirteen to seventeen. Another box was being filled.

By eighteen, the ugly was being camouflaged by a few more pounds, refusal to wear my glasses even though I was legally blind, disappearing pimples, cotton balls stuffed in my bra, and a face that was getting bigger and catching up to my buckteeth. The opposite sex was beginning to notice.

At twenty I met Prince Charming and I knew what I had to be to win his love: nice, sweet, accommodating, non-confrontational, submissive, domestic, feminine, and untouched by another prince. Bingo! I could put a check in each box above, but there was just one problem. Three, actually. With all those attributes I still believed I wasn't good enough. Secondly, there was the ugly me who refused to believe otherwise, and thirdly, what to do with those dang boxes that went with me everywhere.

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