A Fairy Story

(I thought this might make a children's picture book if someone came along to illustrate it with cute colourful pictures!)

Once upon a time there was a very little girl who liked to play – and dream, and just do nothing at all. She liked to get on the swing and go high, feeling the wind on her face, her hair blowing back on her head, or just dangle under the tree, gently rocking with the dying movement of the swing. It felt good to see everything whizzing past, and just as good to move slowly above the ground watching everything slow down. She sometimes imagined that she was the very centre of the whole universe, that she was really the most important princess that ever was, and that everyone else knew that but they were keeping it a secret from her for now. But she knew it anyway, up there on her swing; she could feel the whole world was hers to play with whenever she wanted it.

She also liked to climb trees. She liked the feeling of being strong enough to get to the very top, of how her eyes and arms and legs would do anything she wanted them to, and she loved to look out over the tops of the other trees, and balance on the topmost branches, a little bit afraid but also sure, in a way, that nothing bad would happen to her.

Often she would play with her brothers and sisters. They would invent games and form teams and go out into the bush and frighten each other for fun, or just plan and giggle and explore together.

But she also liked to be alone. This was her dreaming time and she could dream for hours. In fact, her mother used to call her a dreamer. Her mother also used to say that when she herself was younger people had called her 'Dopey Dora' and the little girl wondered if people thought she was dopey too when she was alone dreaming.

Her mother worked very hard. She was always working, because the house and the children had to be clean and tidy, and she had lots of children, and the meals had to be cooked and ready for the father when he came home from his long day of hard work too. All the children had jobs to do, even our little princess (she knew that they couldn't treat her like the princess she was because it was a secret) but they still had time to play.

The mother didn't seem to have any time to play. She was up cooking breakfast before anyone else and sitting up adding together numbers after the children went to bed. She wanted everything to be just right, and the little girl didn't spend much time around her mother because it felt like things were never just right for her, and the little girl felt guilty that perhaps she should help her and in this way make her happy.

But no matter; it seemed like the mother could never be happy, so the little girl stayed away from her so she could be happy on her own. However as she grew, she felt more and more guilty when she wasn't helping her mother, so going away to be happy never worked out quite as she expected. And she found that, like her mother perhaps, she could squash her feeling of guilt by doing things. She learned to keep herself very busy, reading and knitting (often both at the same time) and going for long walks and building things from materials she found around the place, and spending time with her friends away from her own home. But whenever she stopped to do nothing, or whenever she started to play as she had when younger, she could not avoid feeling guilty that she wasn't doing something useful.

This little girl grew up, as little girls do. For as long as she could remember, she had wanted to be a mother, and mother she became. She wanted to play with her children and dress them up in pretty clothes and care for them and watch them grow, and she did all this, but inside her was still this feeling that she wasn't doing as much as she could do, that she had to work harder. She became very busy and did lots of things, juggling the care of her children in among all this, but whenever she stopped to rest, she couldn't enjoy it because of her guilt.

And as she got older she noticed that a lot of the time she was just plain tired. She tried to tell herself that this was only to be expected after years of hard work but that didn't make much sense to her; after all, she was healthy enough and now there weren't all those children to care for, and she knew she didn't even have to work very hard to have enough to live on. And she started wondering if the tired feeling was something to do with doing the things she felt she should do rather than the things she loved.

The trouble was, she couldn't really think of what she did love. She noticed that many of the things she had done her whole life only felt good because other people admired her for them or because they helped her feel she was being useful. She had spent so much of her life feeling guilty for doing what she wanted that she had forgotten how to want to do things – just for fun.

It was no good telling herself she didn't need to feel guilty about anything because that didn't make the feeling go away at all. And she realised that underneath that guilty feeling she felt very very sad that her mummy had had no time to play with her, and that the best way for her mummy to be pleased with her had been for her to work hard, and even then all she remembered was that she hadn't been quite good enough.

So she started crying, and she cried and cried all her sadness away. And while she cried she imagined that she was sitting on God's lap and God was letting her have this big cry and didn't expect her to be brave and stop crying, but just held her softly all the while. And when she stopped crying, she felt a little better. So then she learned that every time the feeling that she didn't much want to do something came back, the thing that helped her the most was to feel sad about when she was little and she had wanted to play but had felt she should do something useful instead. And then, even though she was quite a big girl now, she sat in God's lap and cried some more.

And do you know what? One day, when she had been playing on her swing and climbing trees and just messing round for fun, she noticed that she didn't feel bad at all! And every day after that, no matter how little 'useful work' she did, she was just happy doing all the things she wanted to do, and finding out about all the other things she liked doing.

She liked: writing stories and poems

singing and dancing

helping things to grow in her garden

helping people to feel better

making things to give away and to keep

and lots more

What do you like doing?