Prince Charming Is Dead……I Can Save Myself. A Story of Vampires, Sleeping Beauty and Romantically Created Myths.

Prince Charming Is Dead……I Can Save Myself. A Story of Vampires, Sleeping Beauty and Romantically Created Myths.

Part 1 = The Beginning of the Mythical Lie

When I was about eight or nine years old I was sitting watching the Lawrence Welk show with my parents and my grandfather (yes one might be able to guess my age by that very comment) and as one of the tall, dark and extremely handsome singers (I think his name was Tom Netherton) came on, my mom commented, “one day, hopefully you’ll meet someone like him and he will marry you and make you so happy”.  As I turned back to the box console television set to stare in total wonder at this very white, good looking, devastatingly handsome man.  I began to wonder if there were men out there that looked exactly like him, a Prince Charming type that every girl like me knew would find them someday and take them away to live happily ever after……….

Of course I was only eight or nine years old what the fuck did I know of love, happily ever after or Prince Charming for that matter.  I could file that comment under, “lies my mother told me” and that file would get bigger and bigger as I got older.  But that one particular one, that one thoughtless comment would stick with me for most of my adult life.  The lie that parents perpetuate to their daughters that there is a Prince Charming for every girl out there is ridiculous!  Stop telling these lies to your daughter’s people!  It’s going to fuck them up in so many ways, especially if they are stupid and naive.  Which let’s face it some of them are, but for those of us who ultimately break the cult like haze of some of the things our parents tell us (mostly our mothers) about that illusive man called “Charming”, we will survive the lie.

Okay for the record not all parents tell their daughters that there is a Prince Charming and that he will ride up to their house, no matter where they live, on a white horse and whisk them away into eternal bliss.  Some parents are actually more critical and realistic, it’s just that mine weren’t, they were full of stupid fantasies about what or who their daughter would do and become.  I know what you’re thinking, how can she call her parents stupid?  Well I’m not, I’m saying that their ideas about the fact that I would marry a white guy name Prince Charming was stupid, it is unrealistic.

What makes this idea even more ludacris is that well, I’m Hispanic, I grew up in West Texas, and close to the border with Mexico (because no one really knows where El Paso is if you ask someone from East Texas).  And even then, I didn’t grow up in actual El Paso, I grew up in the rural part of El Paso County, about twenty miles or so to the east of downtown.  My parents resided in a small quaint rural town called San Elizario, okay so I have to embellish because it’s a small, rural Texas town full of predominately Mexican-American people where the one gas station was everyone’s gathering place. Also, at the time I was growing up there many people still had very strong roots to Mexico.  I, on the other hand did not, I was third generation born American.  Anyway, the idea that a white Prince Charming would ride into San Eli and take me away from rural town life was just stupid.

And for the record it didn’t turn out that way for many reasons, but mostly for the failure of my very Mexicanized parents lack of talking to their kids about things like stranger danger, how proud they were of you (if at all), gave positive reinforcement and especially not talking to their kids about the dangers of unprotected sex. I was a casualty of unprotected sex, a teenage Hispanic pregnancy statistic.  Because what I learned I had to learn either in school or from friends and we all will find out how that turned out.

I met my future ex-husband at one of my cousin’s birthday gatherings, God I should have run as far away as I could have.  But then my son wouldn’t have ever been born so, maybe not, in any case I got pregnant at fifteen, married at sixteen (because the bastard didn’t want to marry me).  No, it wasn’t a shotgun wedding nor did I force the him to marry me either.

When I was almost nine months pregnant and after many attempts to get him to understand that at the time I thought I loved him.  I gave up and had resolved to raise this baby on my own, the minute I stopped pursuing him or trying to convince him we should get married (yes, now I realize it was a stupid idea but I was still waiting for that fucking Charming guy to show up) he miraculously changed his mind.   After meeting his mother though, I should have run but that’s another story or maybe another book entirely.  In any case I married the father of my son and proceeded to have two more boys during the fourteen and a half years of marriage.

Not everything was as I thought it should have been, again at forty-eight years old that Prince Charming dude is still missing.  I divorced at twenty-nine years old, became a single mother to three of the most awesome (albeit sarcastically astute and lovable boys) and struggled to make it as a single mom.  No higher education at the time and naive in many ways I tried to navigate my way through life stumbling, no falling face first into the concrete I call life, that I believed maybe now that Charming guy would finally show up and rescue me, WRONG.  Stay tuned for part two……