Petulant Princesses

I have seen a phenomenon that drove me back to university studies in my fifties. I use to have some very ‘airy fairy’ ways of describing this thing I saw/see/saw that troubles me even more now that I have learned new names to call it. For now, I will revert to a descriptive metaphor, ‘Petulant Princesses’, that suddenly came to mind while I was ranting about the need for lobotomies to a friend of mine who has her own Petulant Princess to thwart her family’s existence.

These are young women who openly ‘eat’ their mothers and some ‘others’ for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but most assuredly their mothers are the most palatable and the easiest to chew. Unconsciously these 'fire-y' maidens understand who is the most powerless, and I cannot say as I blame them, I am just trying to learn how to live through the uprising I have seen/see/seen happen right before my eyes to other mothers and me who cannot justify the extreme hostility that is reflected back at us.

Young women today are very angry. And, not just a little bit, but they have had a ‘bloody guts full’ and unfortunately, the only people they know they can take it out on, is ‘Mommy Dearest’. After all, if you cannot trust anyone to treat you as an equal across the game board, who needs a Queen? She may be powerful in chess, but that is the only place she is and this is obviously finally becoming a very big problem. Thankfully, but ouch!

It all began a long time ago, but Petulant Princesses do not KNOW this, they think their own mothers just now invented it, their loss of power. And, this powerlessness has some very ugly ramifications that are displayed in outright rage that clouds even the most educated minds at times, and to a childish and uneducated woman, has little if no opportunity to be expressed without many psychological slaughters, defamation of character and turmoil that will certainly finish the ‘nuclear family’, but then, perhaps losing the ‘nuclear family’ is not such a bad thing?

Personally, I am very happy for the many gay men and women brave enough to want to raise children these days. There is something to say about the strength of character it takes to come out and live authentically in a world wherein a 'fatwa' exists just as much in a Christian nation as in Islam. Unfortunately, I pity anyone raising a Petulant Princess, they have no loyalties to anyone and take no prisoners, they just leave bloody guts and mayhem, so inexperienced are they to their new powers of mobility with no real power at all.

However, even a great education does not preclude these consequences in some instances; Alice Walker’s daughter has done a good job of showing the world just how far a Petulant Princess can go to get a toe-hold within a world that is still, bottom line, a patriarchal society. I ache from and for this phenomenon, perhaps we are not so far away from collectively crying out and saying, “I will give my Petulant Princess in exchange for a Kingdom’.