"Ever After" Birdie's Lesson Part One

Remember the movie “Ever After”? Starring Drew Barrymore as Danielle de Barbarac aka Nicole du Lancre . It is the best Cinderella story ever! When it was in theaters I saw it at least 4 times! Then when it finally came out on VHS I watched it every day for a month or more. I just finished watching it again. . . for the 100,000^th time.

I’m not really sure exactly why I love this Cinderella story so much. . . it could be because they made her out to be an intelligent woman who loved to read and speak her mind. It could also be that Cinderella and Prince Charming actually had a relationship with issues, prior to The Masque and it wasn’t just him seeing her there and falling in love with her at first sight.

At the end of the movie they have wed, and are holding each other and talking sweet nothings and he says to her “We, my dear, are supposed to live happily ever after’”.

When I was growing up I would daydream about the man I would marry. He would be tall and handsome. Funny and kind, sweet, romantic, spontaneous, and he would treat me like a princess. We would marry and live happily ever after. . .

Ha ha ha! Life is no Fairy Tale! I mean my husband is tall and handsome, funny, sweet, kind, romantic, and spontaneous, but there is a reason all of the fairy tales end at “happily ever after”. If we knew what would happen after that, most of us girls would not spend any time day dreaming about our “Prince Charming”.

You may be thinking “she seems bitter.”

I am not bitter. . . I love my husband very much. But marriage has not been what I daydreamed it would be. For some reason I thought the first year “The Honeymoon year” was going to be amazing! That it would be nothing but making love and calling each other Honey and Baby and doing everything we could to make the other person happy. . . Then we got married and I moved in with him. There were so many “adjustments” to make. I somehow had to learn how to fall asleep to the sound of a bear growling all night long. He had to learn to put the toilet seat down but leave the lid up. (when I was pregnant, the next year, there was nothing worse than having to bend over to lift the lid before I could sit down to pee!)

We had to get used to each other’s habits and learn what “happily ever after” looked like to each of us. For a while there, I thought his “happily ever after” looked like me making his meals, doing his dishes and his laundry, sorting through the bills and taking care of all the mundane tasks in life. While my “happily ever after” consisted of breakfast in bed every Sunday morning, making love every morning and night, and him making enough money to pay the bills so I wouldn’t have to stress about them.

I think it needless to say that neither one of us got our “happily ever after”.

Next post I will introduce you to Birdie and tell you what I learned from her and hopefully you will be able to see where I am going with this. . .