A few years ago I blogged about having seen The Little Mermaid at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. It was a sing-a-long and transported me to my days of watching the film on a daily basis with my best friends at the time. While watching the film, I was struck by the coincidence of having been addicted to that particular film and then having followed love to a different world of sorts as an adult.
During my Ariel-addiction, I was staying with my great aunt and got to visit the Kindergarten where she taught. She said that they would be watching The Little Mermaid and I was thrilled. I could not get enough of that film and the idea of watching it with little kids who might be experiencing it for the first time was exciting. But it turned out that my sweet aunt had brought an animated copy of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid. My disappointment was dramatic. The film was grim. The sea creatures were not colorful and cheery, the mermaid was not hopeful and plagued by her less intelligent and superficial-seeming sisters. The titular Mermaid was blasted to bits and eaten by the sea-witch's kampine underlings, if memory serves.
As a 34 year old foreigner, more than 58 hundred miles from the Castro theater, I think that I may more closer relate to Andersen's Mermaid than to Disney's. The 16 year old zeemermin had to clamp oysters on herself, which she found painful. Much like my ostomy bag that I clamped on myself at age 16. And my siblings want and wanted for my good health, just like the Mermaid's older sisters, with their flowers.
At the end of the story, the sisters say „...for every day on which we find a good child, who ist he joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at the good conduct, for we smile with joy at his good conduct,…” There’s more about how poorly behaved children contribute to the mermaids’ suffering, but that’s just the traditional fear-inducing nature of old fairy stories.
During my Ariel-addiction, I was staying with my great aunt and got to visit the Kindergarten where she taught. She said that they would be watching The Little Mermaid and I was thrilled. I could not get enough of that film and the idea of watching it with little kids who might be experiencing it for the first time was exciting. But it turned out that my sweet aunt had brought an animated copy of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid. My disappointment was dramatic. The film was grim. The sea creatures were not colorful and cheery, the mermaid was not hopeful and plagued by her less intelligent and superficial-seeming sisters. The titular Mermaid was blasted to bits and eaten by the sea-witch's kampine underlings, if memory serves.
As a 34 year old foreigner, more than 58 hundred miles from the Castro theater, I think that I may more closer relate to Andersen's Mermaid than to Disney's. The 16 year old zeemermin had to clamp oysters on herself, which she found painful. Much like my ostomy bag that I clamped on myself at age 16. And my siblings want and wanted for my good health, just like the Mermaid's older sisters, with their flowers.
At the end of the story, the sisters say „...for every day on which we find a good child, who ist he joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened. The child does not know, when we fly through the room, that we smile with joy at the good conduct, for we smile with joy at his good conduct,…” There’s more about how poorly behaved children contribute to the mermaids’ suffering, but that’s just the traditional fear-inducing nature of old fairy stories.
I’m currently waiting
for medical advice and am unsure of the future health or my infertility or
choices about how to become a parent. There’s a focus on my long-term health
and talk of revisiting adoption.
Today I was thinking
of The Little Mermaid. I never saw the sequel, so I don’t know if the
ginger-haired Disney princess struggled with infertility or had weird, hybrid
mer-babies or something. I just know that I still struggle with not looking at
things that seem beyond my grasp and detaching from them. But I know that I
have to stop it, or suffer.
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