Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  Ellen confines her feelings about her husband to a series of journals that Tom has never read, and he seems unconscious of the depths of her anger. He is aware, however, of his daughter’s increasing moodiness, but he casts about for its source in vain.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he says, stroking the family cat, which has jumped into his lap. “She’s got two parents; we’re college-educated; we have all these neat things; she has anything she wants; we don’t speak with foreign accents—what’s the problem? I think Becca looks for things to get mad about.”

  Becca has told me that she thinks her father drinks too much and that she’s alienated from him as a result. When I mention this to Tom, he seems genuinely shocked. “I don’t drink to excess,” Tom insists. “I’m never out of control. But maybe Becca sees things she doesn’t care for. We’ve never debated the issue; she’s never been negative about it to me.”

  Tom also briskly dismisses a theory of Ellen’s, that his disappointment in his son has placed a wedge in his relationship with Becca. “I didn’t expect to live my life through Jason,” he says. “It’s not like we called him Tom Jr. or anything. When you have kids, you have to accept that all bets are off. That ‘Father Knows Best’ thing is only on TV. I don’t know that Becca understands that. We’re not perfect—there is no perfect family.”

  Having rejected other alternatives, Tom attributes his daughter’s withdrawal to a natural teenage phase, carried to an extreme by a pampered child. He considers Becca overwrought and hyperbolic in her emotions, but then he blames himself and Ellen for that: perhaps, he says, their indulgence of her moods encouraged Becca’s hypersensitivity. Since it’s too late for what he calls “behavior modification,” Tom feels the best course of action for him is to steer clear of his daughter, to communicate through Ellen, and to appreciate the rare moments when Becca and he are at ease in each other’s company. In the end, though, he believes that a rift between fathers and daughters is inevitable.

  “It’s harder to be a father to a daughter than a son,” he explains. “I subscribe to that theory that women are from Venus and men are from Mars, and we can’t understand certain things about each other because of that.”

  For months April Welch tells me about her mother, Denise. I try to meet her: we talk on the phone nearly a dozen times and she seems eager to discuss April’s school progress as well as her own attempt to reconstruct her life. But whenever we choose a time and place to meet, she stands me up. Three times we agree to meet at the school, but she never shows; later we agree to meet at a cafe near her apartment and I wait for two hours; twice we agree to meet at the corner of the housing project where she lives, but even when our talk is scheduled just a few hours after a phone conversation, Denise forgets.

  In early spring, I ask April if she’ll bring me home with her one day for a sneak attack, but she shakes her head. “I can’t do that,” she says, her voice thick with pain. “I think . . . I think my mom might be on drugs again.”

  By May, I can no longer reach Denise: the family’s phone has been disconnected. As her mother becomes increasingly incapacitated, however, April steps in to fill the void, becoming a kind of junior mother. She takes on full responsibility for caring for herself and her younger brother, begging one of her aunts for a few dollars to buy chicken wings and potatoes for dinner, giving the boy her own small portion when his is inadequate, and insisting that he attend school even when she does not.

  In early June, Denise begins stealing from the small stash of money that April has hidden in her room for emergencies, but April says nothing; she just buys a lock for her door. When, a few days later, Denise breaks the lock and rifles through her daughter’s possessions again, stealing a VCR that April had bought before her mother’s latest decline, the remainder of her money, and some of her clothing, April sits down on her bed and sobs.

  “I know my mom,” April tells me sadly one afternoon. “I can see what she’s doing. She’s doing drugs for sure and there’s starting to be prostitution, men coming into the house. I don’t know what they are doing in there exactly, but I don’t want those men coming after me next.”

  When the year’s final grades are reported, April fails every subject except gym. She is still unable to add or to construct a simple sentence, but, as predicted, she is promoted to eighth grade anyway. Yet, although the school system has essentially dismissed her, and her mother all but abandoned her, April perseveres.

  On a late June night, she lies awake in bed, listening as the sound of her mother trading sex for crack drifts through the wall. She grabs two socks and jams one against each ear to block out the noise. When that doesn’t work, she wraps a pillow around her head, the socks still in place. Lying there crying, she realizes once again that the only way she can save herself is to leave home.

  “I was thinking, I have to do something if I want to do something different in my life or I’ll end up doing like my mom’s doing,” she tells me later. “I’ll end up doing prostitution for drugs and sleeping with all kinds of different guys and having all kinds of kids maybe. So I prayed to God that night. I decided I’d leave and go with my auntie Lydia. And if she wouldn’t have me, I’d go get a job and pay my own rent somewhere. But I couldn’t stay there.”

  The next morning, April called Child Protective Services and was again placed in a group home. After several days, however, she phoned her great-aunt and -uncle, Lydia and George Roberts, who agreed to take her in, at least on a temporary basis. To April, this aunt and uncle are the stuff of fantasy: they both hold stable jobs—Lydia works in the accounting department of a large corporation and George has a job with the city—they go to church every Sunday and the house where they live with their seventeen-year-old son is clean, calm, and safe.

  “At first, my husband said this was too much for us, to take April on,” Lydia told me when we spoke on the phone shortly after April moved in with her. “We have a child of our own and we’re not so young anymore. But somehow, April touched our hearts. The night after she called, my husband woke me up at two in the morning and said, ‘I don’t know why I’m saying this, but if you want to take April in, I’m with you all the way.’ I asked him what happened and he said, ‘I don’t know, I just know you love her.’ Well, I don’t know about that, but I know she deserves a break. I know that much.

  “April has potential. I believe that. She just needs someone to be there for her when she falls to pick her up, push her back out there, and tell her she can do it. Someone to be there when she’s in need. Someone had to get involved, so I did. I did it because I see a future for April; I have hope for her. She’s very strong. . . . I still have hope for her mother, too. Denise has come up from the gutter before, gotten a job even. But she’s not what concerns me right now. What concerns me is whether April will hold out for the dream, whether she will hold out for all that she hopes for, for all that potential.”

  The last time I see April is during a visit to the Roberts’ home, a whitewashed row house several miles away from the project where Denise lives. When I ring, April answers the door and immediately apologizes for her appearance. She is wearing purple sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt—what she calls her “kicking around” clothes—and her hair is pulled into a haphazard ponytail.

  She leads me to the living room, which is dominated by a large-screen TV, and I sink into an oversize gray sofa. April sits on the floor beside me and leans against a window.

  April is noticeably less fidgety than in our previous conversations. And although she says: “I’m hurting. I’m hurting every night about my mom,” she is filled with pride in her new life. “With my mother, she let us do what we wanted,” she says. “You didn’t have to go to school; you could just stay home. You could be out on the street selling drugs—my brother does that. He likes it like that. But I choose not to go down that path. I choose to do good for myself. So I made a change. And it was all me: if I hadn’t decided to make that change, there wouldn’t never have been no change.”


  Earlier this year, April told me that she aspired toward a career in cosmetology, but she now says she has a new goal: “I want to help kids in the situation I was in. I want them to see me and say: ‘Dang! April got through high school and college and all, and look at all she went through!’

  “You know what I want?” She looks down at my notepad. “I want to write my own book someday. I want to write my own book about my experiences so all the kids like me will know they can do better.”

  As April walks me to the door, I think back to what her counselor said, that there was nothing the school could do for a child who did not want to help herself. If success is, indeed, a three-legged stool, April has, despite profound adult indifference, secured two of those legs on her own. The question is whether she will be provided with the means to shore up the third.

  When I first began talking to the girls at the two schools, we agreed that—so they would feel free to speak candidly—I would not discuss our conversations with their parents or teachers. To reassure them further, I explained the journalistic notion of protecting your source, an idea that they met with much enthusiasm. But in the spring, Becca asked me to read her journal and I realized that my promise of confidentiality had to be broken.

  Early in the second semester, Becca’s two closest friends severed their relationships with her. Although the rift began with an inconsequential spat, one of the girls said she realized she was sick of Becca’s “putting herself down.” The other said: “You have to reassure her fifty times a day that she’s not fat, that she’s pretty. She’s so sensitive; I know I should be more understanding, but it’s kind of a relief not to have to worry about that anymore.” As girls will in their middle school years, they shifted alliances. But when the new cliques were formed, Becca was left alone.

  With few emotional reserves to fall back on, Becca panicked. She began spending her lunch periods in the school library so she wouldn’t have to be by herself on the school yard; when her mother would allow it, she took “mental health days,” staying at home in bed. As her social isolation increased, she began confiding in her journal (with an eye toward a reader), trying to sort out her anger with her friends from her own culpability.

  “I never really felt that I was that good,” she writes in one entry. “It felt like no matter what I did, it wasn’t good enough. . . . Putting myself down kind of reassured me that I was okay”; later, she muses, “I lack self-esteem and confidence.” But when her anxiety doesn’t abate (and her friends don’t return), Becca begins to conflate her distress over her parents and friends with her dissatisfaction over her weight: “I need therapy and diet pills soon,” she writes in March, as if both were needed to effect a true cure.

  Then, on March 23, Becca writes: “I downed eight Tylenol P.M. Good. I hope I end up in a coma then die!! . . . Why am I suicidal? . . . I don’t even want Peggy to read this entry. She’s an adult and would call a drug or suicide hotline.”

  I considered myself to be an observer of these girls’ lives, not a participant in them. Yet I felt I couldn’t ignore the significance of Becca’s gesture. So on my next visit to Weston, I sat Becca down for a talk. That day, she was feeling better and was more interested in discussing some recent prank phone calls she’d made to boys than her journal entries. I told her that her instincts were right: I did have to talk to an adult about what she’d written and we agreed I would talk to her mother. Becca just asked that I not tell anyone at school.

  A week later, Ellen and I sat on the Holbrooks’ front steps—she in her gardening gear, sunglasses covering her eyes—talking about the breach between Becca and her friends. Ellen had tried to intercede, phoning one of the girls to chat “friend to friend,” but that didn’t seem to patch things up for long. In the meantime, Ellen’s own relationship with Becca has grown strained. “Becca’s gotten sullen,” she says. “Our relationship isn’t as intimate or consistent as before. She’s been pulling back; sometimes we don’t talk at all.”

  She turns to me confidentially. “A week ago Monday, I could hardly wake her,” she admits. “I came in and her lips were kind of stiff and I thought: Oh my God, can I do CPR? How do I revive her? Do I call 911? I was scared she’d done something. I shook her and she was okay, but she was sort of stumbling down the stairs, really groggy.”

  Ellen kept Becca home from school that day and arranged an appointment with the school counselor. She also broke one of her own rules and snooped around her daughter’s room while Becca was out. “All I found was Bayer headache formula and that wouldn’t account for it. She’s being deceptive. She’s never been deceptive before.” Ellen pauses. “But, she seems okay now, and it hasn’t come up again, so I let it go.”

  I tell Ellen what I read in her daughter’s journal. She rubs her palms against her thighs; her dark glasses hide her eyes, but her lips and the muscles in her cheeks tighten. “Well,” she says and lets out a breath, “I’m not surprised.” She pauses. “Oh, dear.” Another deep breath. “I guess I’ll have to find out what’s in her drawers and talk to her about it.”

  Ellen continues to rub her legs, looking grim. “I guess she’s been asking for more help than I’ve been giving,” she says. “Maybe I should’ve paid attention a long time ago.

  “I’d decided already to put her in therapy, but I thought we’d do it this summer, because I didn’t have time now. So I guess I have that twinge of mother guilt. I know she needs to get her self-image into some perspective. And she needs to get her thoughts on relationships with boys and men in order.” Ellen sits for a moment, staring straight ahead, then says, “Becca really needs a boyfriend, it defines her so much.”

  I ask if she really thinks that’s the solution.

  “Well, it has so much to do with her self-image right now. But I guess, if they broke up . . .” She trails off; the sentence need not be completed.

  “I know that, when she goes into therapy, she may get angry with me as well as Tom,” Ellen says. “I’m prepared for that. She may get angry at the role model I’ve been, tolerating what I’ve been tolerating. But she’s experiencing anger now, obviously. I’d like to see it come out in a more healthy way. I’m not sure I’m prepared for what Tom has to deal with, though. I don’t know what he’ll do with the issues as they come up. But it will be this summer, so we’ll see. I think it’s going to be, and I apologize to Mr. Shakespeare for this, the summer of our discontent.”

  Soon after my last conversation with Ellen, I left these girls’ lives, uncertain of how their stories will play out. I think of April as I last saw her, standing at the front door of her aunt’s home full of hope, despite the countless challenges she still faces between now and her high school graduation. And I think of Becca, too, looking worried and anxious about the summer, and her transition to ninth grade. Becca’s obstacles may be less obvious than April’s—less a matter of attaining basic literacy or being assured of a roof over her head—but they are no less daunting. Her future also depends on her ability to transcend the model that her parents, for all their good intentions, have set for her: to, like April, choose “not to go down that path” and instead to chart her own.

  *Names and identifying details in this story have been changed.

  What’s Wrong with Cinderella?

  This story went viral on Christmas Eve Day, 2006; half the readers who commented or emailed called me things like “bad mother,” “un-American,” or said they felt “sorry for my daughter.” The other half were relieved that someone had given words to their own misgivings. Those conflicting, though equally passionate, responses made me realize I was on to something—I wanted to go further. And so, Cinderella Ate My Daughter was born. Since then, girls’ culture has gone in two directions. Princesses may be the number one kids’ franchise, topping Star Wars—but, thanks to parental pressure (and maybe just a little bit to Cinderella Ate My Daughter) Disney, as well as upstart toymakers, are offering a few more alternatives. That makes a difference: archery, for instance, has become the f
astest growing sport among American girls, and according to a study by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, 70 percent of girls cite either Merida from Brave or The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen as inspiration. So forget about princess: start calling your daughter president!

  I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office—one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs, and arcade games—where I’d taken my three-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; and made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” handing her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?,” I lost it.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”

  She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.

  “Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, California. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”

  My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”

  Diana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion globally this year, from $300 million in 2001. There are now more than twenty-five thousand Disney Princess items. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet.