Does Cinderella Really Get Her Slipper Back?

We all read the story, the young girl who is ill-fated by the untimely death of her father to be trapped into a life of despair with her wretched step-mother and two foul-tempered step-sisters. We speak of Cinderella, the poor servant girl who is transformed by her fairy-Godmother into a ravishingly beautiful maiden then swept off to the ball to find the prince and rescued from her prison home. Is she really? The story doesn’t go any further than the Prince marries Cinderella and takes her away in the carriage? No one goes into the trials and tribulations of a relationship or marriage with a young girl or even a young man for that matter. Maybe if someone would have sat down with more of us when we were younger, we would have been better prepared to handle the situations that were faced as married couples or involved couples. For we all have some pre-conceived notion that we should have some Cinderella moment that someone should come rescue us, when in fact, we should rescue ourselves.
Recently I was watching the movie “Parenthood” with Steve Martin. I have never had relationships described in such a way as in this particular scene in this movie. The grandmother, whom wise beyond her years, is being escorted out to the car to go see one of Steve Martin’s characters’ children’s school play. She over hears the heated discussion between Martin and Mary Steenburgen’s characters on their relationship and their pregnancy. The grandmother starts to describe a roller coaster ride that her late husband had taken her on long ago; how the ride had twists and turns. That it jostled her up and down, that she was frightened and full of joy all at the same time. She mentioned that some people had opted to just go on the Merry-Go-Round, however that just went around and around in circles not giving any excitement or adventure to anything. Grandma had said that she preferred the roller coaster; she enjoyed the unexpected and excited rather than the dull and uneventful. The writer of that script had been very insightful day that day. Relationships really rather are like roller coasters and merry-go-rounds. You can either live them with excitement or live them with rigid structure and no surprises. It all rather depends on the form in which you tend to live your life. In relationships, we all cater to the notion that somewhere is that person who is going to steal our breath away. It is the life that has been built around that preverbal Hollywood dream. That romantic vision that has been embedded in our thoughts as young girls as we drifted off to sleep. The visions of Knights in armor on their noble steeds wielding their swords to vanquish the horrid queen that held us captive in the tower above. Can we really believe the notion that real, true love exists? Or is real, true love not what we find but what we make? I think that somewhere someone forgot to mention that it is up to us to fill in the blanks to make sure that Cinderella gets her slipper back, that happy ever after was attainable, just hard to reach. It is never easy to question one’s true intentions when in a relationships, however I feel that could be what’s missing in the puzzle we call life and romance. We are not allowing us to actually look deep inside ourselves to find what we truly need for fear of what we might find. We should not be afraid of who we truly are, for each of us are unique and special in a way that someone out there is going to find irresistibly charming and seductive. It is up to us to find out if Cinderella really does get her slipper back.