A Princess. Thursday, 19 March 2015

8:37 p.m.

Her head nestles under my chin, scratching ever so affectionately. Her fingers twirl the tattered tulle as the conversation flutters around her. She can’t contain the enormous yawn that causes her head to tip back into my left shoulder and her long lashed eyes to flutter. The rocking starts to become her own rhythm. She’s a princess.

When she entered the one room house by the back door, she was invisible. The older girls were playing games and doing homework. The teachers were talking rapidly in Tigrigna. She caught my eyes as if pleading to find a place to sit in the crowded room. She’d already been rejected to share a stool with a girl playing catch with me. I offered her my lap. She accepted with a smile.

With a scab on her nose from fighting a dragon earlier, her soft laughter crackled like pure happiness. She put her two small hands in two of my fingers to play catch and pass. When the soft, deflating ball bonked her in the head she giggled and looked at me, her eyes saying, “I don’t know what happened, but that was fun.” When the other girl left, she continued to study the ball and wanted to toss it to an invisible partner across the room. When I rubbed the ball on her dust-covered toes, she scrunched up her legs laughing. She stretched for the ball that I kept just out of reach, expectantly even when she had to tip backwards trusting in my arms to support her.

There are gaps in the seams of her faded pink dress. Damp and dirt run down trying to steal her beauty. A lone, surviving silver bedazzle hangs on by threads like the last jewel in a broken, cast-aside tiara. A wooden cross hangs around her neck on a thin black thread. Her heavenly father is a King. She is a princess.

Frances Hodgson Burnett captivates this beautifully in a passage from one of my favorite books. “I am a princess. All girls are. Even if they live in tiny old attics. Even if they dress in rags. Even if they aren’t pretty or smart or young. They’re still princesses. All of us. Didn’t your father ever tell you that? Didn’t he?”

The girl on my lap may never be told that she is a princess. She may never know that she is priceless, beautiful, and worthy of respect. She will probably spend her whole life in a culture that too often under appreciates, disrespects and ignores females of all ages. Her father may wish she was a boy. But that doesn’t change who she is. She is a princess.

I can only whisper encouragement to so many girls for them to grasp the truth of these words. Even if every female told every other female, there is something special and significant about a father, a male, truly respecting and standing up for the princesses. It’s the father putting the daughter on his lap and reading her a story. The boy who stops the jokes from his friends that may prevent him from being “cool” in their eyes, but “way cool” in hers.

Dirt, grim, circumstances may try to blot out the princess’s glory, but nothing can change her heart without her consent. Build that heart up strong and proud. Teach her to dream like Cinderella, Rapunzel and Arial, value character like Jasmine and Belle, make friends like Snow White, and work hard towards goals like Tatiana.

Never let her forget that she is a princess.