Princess Tea Party
Mary Soon Lee
Three days
after the party
they
presented to my daughter
as she sat in
her princess dress,
holding her
brand-new princess doll.
Easy to
discard the rose,
but not the
memory
of twenty
little girls
with pink tiaras
in their hair:
fat girls and
thin girls,
quiet girls
and chatterboxes,
sipping apple
juice tea
from twenty
tiny cups;
twenty
would-be princesses
waiting
through the stories
and the songs
and the
presents
for Her, the
Princess Aurora,
and then the
minute,
or less than
a minute,
that she
spent at each table,
smiling for
her pay.
What happened
to me?
What turned
me into a collaborator
in that
festival of pink,
I who had
thought my daughter
would play
with rockets,
climb trees
in jeans?
Now, under my
daughter's spell,
I tell myself
there was
nothing wrong
with her
pretending
the princess
would lift her
into a fairy
tale;
and nothing
wrong
with my
pretending
that all
twenty little girls
would grow up
to be
engineers.
Poet's Notes: I wrote this poem after attending a Princess Tea Party with
my then four-year-old daughter at Disney. It was a bizarre event, with a crowd
of little girls in fancy dresses riveted by a woman playing the part of a
fairytale princess.
The first
draft of the poem was too long. I trimmed it down a few years ago and then
trimmed it further a few months ago. Sometimes it takes a while before I can
consider my poems with detachment.
In the
meantime, Lucy has grown to a marvelous eleven-year-old. She no longer plays
with dolls, rarely wears pink, and has listened to "Hamilton: An American
Musical" approximately five hundred times.
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