Disclaimer: I own nothing.
He Didn't Get It
"…and then Sleeping Beauty married the Prince and they all lived happily ever after."
He didn't understand it. Why the Princess? Why did she always end up with the Prince? Why didn't he choose someone else?
"Mommy?" A small blonde child asked, removing his thumb from his mouth, "Why did the Prince marry Sleeping Beauty?"
His mother looked down at him affectionately, "Because they were in love, sweetie."
He was still unable to comprehend.
"So they were in love?" The woman with the boy's same golden locks nodded, "Like Snow White and her Prince? Like Beauty and the Beast?" The poor soul yearned for clarification.
"Yes; just like them."
Confusion clouded the child's innocent blue eyes.
"They all got married." His mother chuckled at his inability to grasp the idea.
"Every one. That's what happens when people are in love." She ruffled her son's carefully placed hair, only to have him immediately smooth it back.
"Are there any different stories?"
"Like what, honey?"
The boy considered this question, unsure of how to phrase his own.
"Ones with different endings." His mother looked perturbed for a moment, unsure if her sweet, innocent, boy was looking for some of the more morbid fairy-tales, like the ones made by those horrid brothers.
"You mean, when they don't get married?" The woman searched her child's face for some sliver of understanding.
"No; when they marry someone else." The boy stared at his caregiver with a cherubic face, full of hope that she might hold the answer to his question.
"Well, in the real story of 'The Little Mermaid', the little mermaid's prince marries another girl." The blonde woman cautiously avoided the part about the poor fish-girl's untimely death at the end, checking her son's reaction.
"That's not what I mean…" The child ran his fingers through his slightly-lengthy hair, tucking loose strands behind his ears. His mother watched him, sighing. His older brother had been so difficult; he was just so…hateful. He was nothing like the angelic preschooler that currently occupied their mother's lap. She wished he would never change; her sweet, normal, little boy. She had truly been blessed.
"What I mean is…why a princess?"
"It's not always a princess they choose; sometime's it's a girl who's not royalty at all."
"No, Mommy." The desperate child protested, "Why is it always a girl?"
The blonde woman frantically shook her head. Her baby was just young; in the stage where girls had 'cooties' and little boys were, in their minds, superior. That had to be it. So what if her little guy was kinder and more respectful and hung out with her more than any of his friends? That was just good parenting…right? Her son…her son couldn't be…she wouldn't have it. Behavior like that was one-hundred-percent unacceptable.
"Because," She answered briskly, "princes do not marry princes." As she said this, the boy's mother picked him up, set him on the floor, and promptly left the nursery.
Whatever the child said had obviously upset her. And he recognized that. But why did it matter if a prince wanted to marry a prince? He wanted to marry his best friend Warren when he grew up; was that bad? But his mommy didn't like it; so as far as he was concerned, it was taboo. He wouldn't ask her anything like that again. Then they could go back to how they were before she dumped him on the floor, glaring angrily at him. He didn't like it when people rejected him; so he wouldn't ask that awful question-never again.
But he still didn't get it. He never would.