Disney's Curse

So, let me say a little bit about the photo on the front of my blog (for Facebook readers, see it here: www.stepinthetrenches.blogspot.com). The thing is, I wanted to have a little piece of clip art showing a nice woman with two cute kids, doing cute things. So I googled a bunch of clip art, and out of sheer exasperation of being overwhelmed, I finally decided to get a little more specific, and kind of on a lark (since I didn't *really* expect anything good) I googled "stepmom clip art". And this was the very first image, of about 32,500, to appear. Sigh. Of course I knew it was fate and I must choose it when I noticed that her dress matched my blog template's color scheme exactly. :)

So since I've been M and L's stepmom I've noticed that just about every Disney movie/book/thought they have, involves a loving, but tragically, dead mother---and a terribly mean and cruel stepmother. I am mature enough to try to shrug it off with a laugh, and honestly I swear to the heavens I LOVED Cinderella et al as a kid, but after 143 viewings of the same old tired tale in so many forms, it wears on me.

Wednesday Martin's book Stepmonster has some very interesting theories on the origins and relevance of such tales, which I'll go into in further detail later on. But suffice it to say, that for now, I find that image ironically cathartic. Because it embodies everything that I am, as a stepmother---according to children's literary tradition, and in many ways, society's expectations--- and yet, it embodies nothing of who I am.