Fairy Godmothers Without GPS

 

Respect!

What happened to my fairy godmother?  Remember all those stories about girls with several fairy godmothers and each one blesses her at her birth with wonderful gifts?  Some of those gifts were kind of nice, and would have made life pleasant. A little more charm, a lot more grace, one of those voices that makes everyone stop to listen.  Those sorts of things would have come in handy – especially during job interviews. 

You’d think that if a princess rates seven or eight fairy godmothers the rest of us should get at least one or two of those useful ladies – depending on how stressful our lives were going to be or something.  I mean, Cinderella wasn’t a princess and she had a fairy godmother.  Cinderella’s fairy godmother even came back when she got older to continue being helpful.  But I’m pretty sure that if I have a fairy godmother that there is only the one, and it is very probable that she got lost on the way to the blessing ceremony.   I guess fairy godmothers don’t come with GPS.

My fairy godmother didn’t give me softly flowing blonde hair or a voice like a bell or the grace of a dancer.  But, I”ve managed OK so far and as I age I see less and less the need for those gifts anyway.  Now the gifts I want have nothing to do with how I look.  Instead, I want the gift my mother-in-law had of being able to find the things that were in her kitchen cupboards. I want the gift of never losing the lid for a storage container or casserole dish; the knack for stacking bowls, plates, and cups as compactly as the manufacturer had them when I brought them home from the store.  That gift should also be good for loading dishwashers, keeping order in the silverware drawer, fitting towels into the bathroom cupboard, and rotating the contents of the refrigerator so they don’t fall out when we open the door – oh, yeah, and so we get them used before they go bad. 

It might have been nice if my fairy godmother had spared me from ADHD, since one of the symptoms is the inability to walk a truly straight path through a room. Having an over-active brain and trouble with impulse control is something I’ve gotten used to.   I don’t mind the adaptations needed for being left-handed, and I kind of figure I deserve the arthritis in my knees.  I also don’t feel the need for a fairy godmother to handle the over-abundance of stuff in my home; I’ll take the blame for that.  Where I would really like my fairy godmother to excel is to keep me from being the target for so much gravity and equal-and-opposite-reaction stuff.  Why do I have to try three times to get my cane to stay leaning politely where I put it?  Why do stacks of things fall over when I walk through a room – even when I don’t bump into them?  Why does one stack of books and papers falling have to cause three other stacks to tumble? 

Then there is the distraction factor – I really needed my fairy godmother to be on the ball with that.  I already mentioned the ADHD, and distraction is my middle name.  Even good things can be distracting  – laundry, dishes, mail, cooking – those chores are easy to ignore on an average day, but they call out to me when I need to be writing.  Shouldn’t my fairy godmother have helped me organize my time better?

Where is my fairy godmother? What gift did she give me?  Have you ever found yourself asking a similar question – and if so, do you have any answers?