Cinderella And What Happens After The Ball

No story has sat closer to my actual life than Cinderella. I’m honestly still not entirely sure whether that is comforting or grim. Probably both…. probably.

The version most people know is the animated Disney one, which is frankly way too soft and glamorous for my liking. The older tellings, really, are harder. In the Grimm account there is no fairy godmother at all. Aschenputtel plants a hazel branch on her mother’s grave, waters it with her tears until it grows into a tree, and a white bird in that tree gives her what she asks for. The stepsisters cut off a toe and then a heel to force the slipper, and the birds notice the blood in the shoe and call it out.

That is the version I find more accurate to how these things go.

My father was largely absent but he wasn’t at all cruel to me. There were periodic and honestly quite lovely pockets of memories with him. An afternoon here, a conversation there…. that I still hold onto because they were genuinely enriching and because there were so few of them that I could count them if I sat down and tried. My mother, however, ran the house. I did not have two stepsisters, but I had a brother, and he more than filled the role at the time.

And I scrubbed floors. Hours of it, on my hands and knees, and here is the part that took me years to articulate properly: the floors did not need it.

I was not being corrected for sloppy work. The scrubbing was not maintenance and it was not consequence. It was a task assigned because a task needed to be assigned, and the assignment was the point.

It all started when I gave my life to Christ in fifth grade.

My mother’s hatred of God was not abstract, and once I became a Christian it had somewhere to actually sit and fester. Her theory, as far as I could reconstruct it, was that sufficient punishment would eventually make me stop being brainwashed. So there was scrubbing, and long stretches locked in a closet, and the two of them were not unrelated to my faith. They were about my faith.

What she did not account for is that I turned all of it into prayer.

I do not want to romanticize this statement because it was not peaceful and I was not serene. There was no singing or little mice to keep me company. But the floor and the closet became the only uninterrupted time I had, and I gave it to God because there was nothing else to do with it and because He was the reason I was there. I would work through a section of tile and talk to Him the entire way. In the closet I would sit in the dark and keep talking. It became kinda close to comfort but not exactly. Adjacent to it, perhaps.

I have read a fair amount of Christian writing about suffering since then, and most of it does not describe this.

It describes suffering that produces character, or suffering that God permits toward some end, or suffering endured with a clear sense of His presence. What I had was smaller and a bit stranger. I had a task nobody needed done, and I filled the time with God because the time was going to pass regardless.

Paul writes from prison that he has learned to be content in whatever circumstance. that he knows how to be brought low and how to abound (Philippians 4:11-12). The verb is emathon, I learned: an acquired skill, not a temperament. He is describing something he did not start out possessing. I think a child scrubbing a clean floor and talking to God is somewhere at the beginning of that curriculum, though I would not have called it that at the time.

That brings me to the other half of the Cinderella story: the part I have never let go of.

I dreamed about a prince like the story trains you to. But somewhere early the figure changed, and the prince became Jesus. And the fantasy was never the castle. I have written before about the image I keep returning to: a cardboard box in a dark alley where nobody walks, room enough for two, and He is the other one in it.

That was the shape my Cinderella ending took. Not elevation or rescue from my circumstances. Just being with Him, permanently, somewhere nobody could reach.

I still dream it. .

But that expectation raises this: if the ending is fixed and located after death, what exactly am I supposed to be doing between now and then? Am I positioning myself to scrub floors until the carriage arrives?

I have written elsewhere about the danger of treating hardship as evidence of holiness: the trap of reading your own suffering as validation, which I learned early and have had to keep unlearning. That is one error and I know its shape well.

What I am asking now is nearly the opposite question. Not whether I manufacture suffering to feel righteous, but whether I have actually concluded that hoping for happiness on this earth is a kind of mistake. Whether I have arranged my expectations so that nothing good is scheduled until after I die.

Because I notice that I do not chase certain things. I do not dream of a prince charming who is an actual man. I have trouble constructing the mental image of that kind of love in my direction, and when I try, the picture does not resolve. My reference material is a family that was hell-bent on destroying whoever was nearest and would take power to do it if power was available, and a marriage that ran on the same fuel, and a string of relationships since that were variations on the theme. So somewhere along the line I concluded that love on this earth, in my direction, is not on the menu.

That conclusion feels reasonable from the inside. It also may be a failure of imagination.

But the Bible is genuinely two-handed about this.

On one side there is a persistent instruction to locate your hope beyond this life.

• Set your minds on things above (Colossians 3:2).
• Our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20).

On the other side, the same book is stuffed with earthly goods presented as goods.

The Psalms ask for deliverance now, and get it, and say so. Jeremiah tells the exiles in Babylon. THat is, people in the middle of a punishment, with seventy years still to run, to build houses and plant gardens and take wives and have children and seek the welfare of the city (Jeremiah 29:5-7). And God is not telling them to endure. He is telling them to construct a life in a place they did not choose, during a stretch He has already said will not end soon.

Which means that even inside a captivity God has ordained, He commands the planting of gardens… not just enduring the garden-less years piously.

I think there is a version of what I have done that can be considered a kind of prudence. My family was what it was. The men were what they were. Adjusting expectations downward after sufficient evidence is not pessimism and I have written before about how the cost of certain relationships has repeatedly exceeded what they returned.

But there is another version that is closer to a preemptive refusal. If I decide in advance that love cannot be here, then I never have to find out.

The conclusion protects me from disappointment, and protection was always what I was optimizing for as a child on that floor. It would be strange if the habit had not followed me.

Proverbs says hope deferred makes the heart sick (13:12), and the second half of that verse is the part people skip: but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life. The proverb assumes fulfillment happens. It treats deferral as the exception to the rule.

But the ending I want is not available here.

I do not think I’m being overly pessimistic or anything. Jeremiah suggests that God’s people are supposed to build inside conditions they did not choose and would not have picked, and that building is obedience rather than compromise. A garden planted in Babylon is still a garden.

What I am less certain about is whether I can dismantle a conclusion I reached honestly, from evidence, over a long period. I do not know how a person un-concludes something. I suspect it is not accomplished by deciding to think differently, which has never worked for me on anything. More likely it happens the way the girl in the older story got what she needed: a tree grown slowly from a branch planted in the ground where her mother was buried, watered over years, and eventually something came out of it.

That detail has always struck me as more accurate than the fairy godmother.

Nothing appeared instantly. She planted a thing on a grave and tended it for a long time before it produced.

Like scrubbing floors can be considered to be, most of my days now are unremarkable labor that nobody would call all that meaningful from the outside. I still talk to God through it, which is the one continuity between the child on the tile and the woman I am now.

What I am trying to hold onto is that the scrubbing was never the assignment.

It was the circumstance. The assignment, as far as I can tell from the letter to the exiles, is to build a life in the place I am actually standing, even knowing the place is temporary and the conditions were not of my choosing.

I have no clue if that includes a prince, but I notice that the story I have lived inside my whole life does not end with the girl still on the floor, and I am not sure I have the authority to write a version where it does.