Hold the prince, please

Today, I called my mom. We talked about the mundane for the most part: my little sister’s online schooling, my mother’s stepfather in Ohio, my family’s two dogs, the new Mulan Disney movie. Right before we were about to hang up, though, I asked her, “Why do you love Princess Jasmine from Aladdin so much?” 

Before mentioning this, I knew the answer. She had told me why all throughout my childhood, unprompted.   

“She kicks butt,” my mom said over the phone. “She doesn’t rely on a man to do it for her. She’s not a damsel in distress. She’s smart. She can take care of herself. And she’s got a fucking tiger!” 

And she’s right. In the Disney version, Princess Jasmine refused to be a damsel in distress. Her father, the Sultan, arranged for her to marry a much older man: Jafar, who only wanted to marry Jasmine for the throne. But Jasmine fought back, falling in love with Aladdin, and although he lied to her about being a prince, she still stood up to her father and married the man she wanted, instead of the one forced upon her. It was the first time my mother saw independence portrayed like this—and she longed for it. 

In my mother’s actions, however, I never saw this woman she so desperately wished to be. I saw a woman who revolved her life around the men she dated and based her worth off of what they thought of her and relied on them when things went wrong. I saw the original Princess Jasmine: Badroulbadour, a woman married to Aladdin who relied on him to save her with the help of a genie after she was kidnapped.

And that terrifies me. 

Because I think I am also Badroulbadour.   

My parents divorced when I was three years old and my little sister was a month old; I don’t remember their marriage. But I do remember the many men introduced to my sister and I as friends until my mother met my stepfather. Inherently, this isn’t a bad thing. I don’t care how many men my mother’s been with. I care only in the way it has impacted her, and me. 

For years, I watched my mother dress up and leave notes on the kitchen counter: how to feed my sister, how to take care of her if she had a seizure, how to lock the deadbolt, how to position the curtains so no one could see us home alone. I idly followed along when she found herself in between jobs—which was often during the recession—and we’d pack our things into a moving pod and sleep on the couches of one of her boyfriends until my mom picked herself back up again. 

“We live on the corner of Pod and Homeless Street,” my mother told her friends. 

What she would not tell them was that her boyfriends during those times had saved us; that my sister and I lied awake on couches in the middle of the night while we heard my mother and her boyfriend in the back bedroom; that my mother never tried hard to find a new job. She assumed the role of the damsel in distress that she didn’t want to be. The damsel in distress that Princess Jasmine was not. 

And when my mom began her relationship with my stepfather, who lived in California, she sat my father and I down one weekend and told us he had full custody of me. Then she moved across the country with my sister.

Again, I’m not shaming my mom. Because my present-day mother? I do think she embodies what she loves about Princess Jasmine. She’s the first woman vice president where she works, and she parents my sister now, instead of me. But in my formative years, she was not. She was Badroulbadour, no matter how hard she tried to lead me down a different path.

Consequently, I’ve spent a lot of my life obsessed with the idea of love, or, rather, the idea that I will love myself if a man loves me. I thought, wrongly, that finding a man was the only thing that mattered. Once I could do that, the rest of my life would fall into place; I would be happy. 

That’s what they teach you in fairy tales, anyway. Aladdin saved the day and Badroulbadour smiled and submitted to him because he took control. In some sense, my mother did the same. She found my stepfather—her prince—while we were homeless and after she started a new job; she moved across the country for him, and everything else in her life lined up to today.

As women, though, is that really our only option? Relying on a man? To my mom, Princess Jasmine had more (and a tiger). Thinking of herself, she did not. And because I had no one else to look up to, I thought I didn’t either.  

I didn’t have a boyfriend in high school, and I always believed that was my fault. My mother said it was because I didn’t “put myself out there,” and guys were scared of me. In my head, though, I knew the truth: I wasn’t pretty enough, I wasn’t skinny enough—I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t what the fairy tales said a woman should be. Because if I were enough, my prince would have been there, waiting to pick me up from the wreckage surrounding me. 

He never did. 

And now I don’t want him to. Sure, I’m still working through these beliefs I’ve held all my life, and I do eventually want to be in a relationship. But I don’t want a man to be my only source of happiness. I don’t want to be the girl who needs a man to feel secure. I don’t want to associate my self-worth with how a man rates me on a scale of one to ten. 

I’ve done that already. I deserve better.  

Alone, I am enough.

Ciera Lloyd doesn’t know a world without writing. She earned her BFA in creative writing from UNCW. In September, she will begin her studies for her master of fine arts in creative writing at City, University of London. She, and her other published work, can be found on Instagram @ciera.lloyd.