When Snow White and Prince Charming send their baby through a portal into another universe….
Just hear me out.
When Snow White and Prince Charming get pregnant on Once Upon a Time, they are so happy. Their daughter, Emma, is perfect, and wanted, and very much loved.
And then the evil queen comes around and tries to ruin it all. Because what else do evil queens do?
She sends a dark curse, because blackness must always be evil, so she sends a dark curse through the fairy realms to torture Snow White and Charming and their newborn innocent little girl. Snow White and Prince Charming aren’t sure they’ll be able to stop the curse in time, so they send their daughter through a portal (I know, I know) in a cabinet built by Gepetto (yup, that Gepetto) so that she’ll be safe.
It doesn’t quite work out the way they’d hoped.
Princess Emma grows up thinking no one wants her. She grows up an orphan, tossed from foster home to foster home, manhandled and neglected and generally treated like trash. She does not grow up thinking, maybe I’m secretly a princess from another realm. She grows up thinking, this is all there is, and this really, really sucks.
Emma gets pregnant with a man she loves when she is only a teenager herself. She gives birth in prison and the child is taken from her. That child, too, grows up thinking he was never wanted.
Because this is a fairy tale come to life, everyone eventually finds each other. Emma’s child, Henry, tracks her down and drags her with him back to his hometown of Storybrooke. He tells her that his mom is really the evil queen, and her mom is a woman who looks an awful lot like her generational contemporary, and then they go off on adventures while Henry tries to prove that he is not, in fact, totally crazy.
Eventually, Mary Margaret, the this-world name Snow White goes by, says to her recovered daughter, “we loved you.We wanted to give you your best chance. So we let you go.”
My mother wanted to give me my best chance. So, she let me go.
I played with a lot of white kids when I was growing up. I spent a lot of time in rich-girl houses playing with rich white girls who were no fun, and treated me badly, and bullied me. I felt like a lady-in-waiting trapped in someone else’ fairy tale. I felt like a princess in the wrong story.
My story, I knew, would have pirates, and fisher kings in need of healing, and animals who could talk to humans who took the time to learn their language. My story would include fighting evil on an epic scale, and saving the world from global warming, and fighting alongside a prince who was brave and true and just enough to deserve me. I would be as glorious as Arwen (film), as bold as Lyra (book), as determined as Alanna (never made into a film), as courageous as Sabriel.
No one would care whether I was beautiful, or poised, or pretty like in a picture, the way I was taught a girl is supposed to be.
No one would care, because I would be off doing amazing things.
My mother loved me, in her own way. My mother loved me, but she never truly saw me. When I was younger, I thought she pushed me into these toxic relationships with toxic people because she wanted to use me as a pawn to advance her own integration into whiteness. Now I know she was only trying to do what she thought was best for me. She was trying to give me my best chance.
My mother is a woman of color, and she knew how painful that was. She didn’t want that for me. So, she refused to let me build friendships with girls like her. She pushed me to assimilate. She practiced the Jewish strategy for survival that had dominated our community in America for years — smile. Go along with it. Ignore the insults. Don’t let them get to you. Fit in.
Don’t be yourself. Be someone else, instead.
I grew up half in and half out of Jewish culture. I went to Hebrew School three days a week. I never actually learned the language, but I learned to get along in a culture that really hated and feared women until quite recently. I learned to love our commitment to justice, our passion for intellectual knowledge, our tenderness towards one another’s wounds.
But I couldn’t stay there.
I had to venture out into “the real world.” In my neighborhood, nearly everyone was white, and rich, and a WASP.The neighbors three houses down, for example, owned a boat. And a house in Lake Tahoe. And a trampoline. Their daughter danced with the New York Ballet. Their son shortlisted for the Olympic showjumping team. They had enough money to sponsor both.
I’m not saying I was jealous, but of course I was jealous.
I was also lucky enough to be treated to a firsthand account of what money can’t buy. My childhood best friend left the New York Ballet after she developed anorexia, just like I did my first college go-round. My seventh grade best friend wanted to kill herself. My ninth grade best friend had tried to kill herself. Money doesn’t cure everything.
Neither does whiteness. Most of my friends had a kind of cultural capital I will never have, but they were still miserable. They were missing something I’ve had since I was a child. They were missing a sense of where they were from, who their ancestors were. They were missing a sense of their own history.
For the longest time, my white friends were drawn to me in hopes I might cure them of this predicament. They relied on me to help them understand their own lives because they lacked the framework, the ethical structure, the self knowledge to do this for themselves. For the longest time, I let myself be used this way. For the longest time, I called this friendship.
I forgot how to fit in with my own people. I started to act like a white girl, afraid of my own voice and my own power, and to fade into the background. I invested in white supremacist values. I thought that’s what would make me lovable, worthy, beautiful.
I thought if I did a good enough job, my mother would love me.
I felt like Emma Swan, abandoned to the wilderness. I thought I had done something wrong. I felt exiled from the places where I felt most at home. I resented my own Jewish community for not coming after me, for not knowing how badly I needed them. I hated the white communities I fell in with, but I didn’t know how to escape them. I felt surrounded by their hatred on all sides.
It took me a long time to find myself in the wilderness. I read a lot of feminists of color from the second wave of the movement, that year I spent lying in bed, trying to prevent my body from compulsively throwing up. It was like all the insults I had ever encountered and ignored, all the times I had sidestepped my Jewish identity to fit into communities I despised, all erupted out of my mouth. It was like learning again how to be a person in this world.
That year, I said a lot of horrible things to my mother. I had never dared to get angry with her before. I had never trusted her enough to tell her how much I hated her for pushing me in a direction that had hurt me so deeply.
She didn’t leave me. She didn’t stop listening.
I thought I’d learned my lesson after that experience, but I didn’t quite.
Because years after that, when I fell in love, I pushed him away too. Why? Because I wanted him to have his best chance. And white supremacist values had taught me that I wasn’t that chance.
I was sure that he could find a thin, white, Ivy League-educated, six-figure earning, able-bodied girl to love him. I figured he did not need to settle for loving me, when he could love someone like her, instead.
So I pushed him away.
I regret that. At least, I am trying to become healthy enough, free of white supremacy enough, to regret that.
People should get to choose where to spend their time on this planet. People should get to decide for themselves what it means to have their best chance.
I am Jewish, and I am myself. I am not perfect. I am not pure. I am not rich. I am not able-bodied. And I am not white.
But I loved him then, and I love him still. Just as much as my mother loved me. Unfortunately, but predictably, I also loved him in exactly the same way.
Asking my mother to love me, and letting go of toxic friendships with white people, and reconnecting with my own Jewish soul through my racial justice work to honor my mother and her suffering, has changed me.
At long last, I know where I belong in this life. I can only hope it is not too late to claim my place.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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