At some point every child
fantasizes herself a foundling,
left on a doorstep by a princess
to be raised by a simple shoemaker and his wife.
The princess-mother would not have made
her daughter take the test she didn’t study for
to teach that actions have consequences,
but she was banished from the kingdom,
leaving her poor infant in the care of imposters
who crushed the child with their ordinariness.
My parents were such as these
my father not a cobbler,
but a hard-working salesman
in the sheet metal business,
my mother, beautiful but critical
as Snow White’s stepmother,
too involved with her own problems
to be bothered by a child’s petty dramas.
Who was this princess mother
that had left me with dullards?
An artist surely, whose talent
and willingness to speak truth to power
had brought vengeance upon her,
leaving her no choice but to protect me
the only way she knew — swaddled and abandoned
on the flagstone walkway of a suburban ranch house,
disappeared without a trace —
no perfumed handkerchief, no sapphire ring
whose star could point me to her —
only a voice that whispered,
“You are more than this. Go inside
and find the self you’re meant to be.
The one I never would have left,
if I weren’t certain you would
get there on your own.”
Paula Rudnick is a former television writer and producer who has spent the past 30 years as a volunteer for nonprofit organizations.
