Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

When my grandfather was dying, he pointed into the gray hospital air and said, “Buildings.”

“Drawn in light pencil,” he said. “All around me.”

“Are they yours?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re mine.” Now he is dead and his children are fighting over these buildings. I tell my mother I am writing about inheritance and fairy tales. “Well,” she says, “soon there will be no inheritance.” I imagine an eraser rubbing all the pencil drawings out at the exact moment my grandfather takes his last breath. An inheritance of rubber dust, as soft as the sawdust lining the twelve coffins in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Twelve Brothers.” That fairy tale begins with a king and a queen and their twelve sons. They are happy until a daughter is born with a gold star on her forehead. The king wants her to inherit the kingdom and so he orders twelve coffins made. A coffin for each son, filled with wood shavings and each fitted with a small pillow. He orders all his sons dead, but the queen orders them to flee into the woods.

What is inheritance? In fairy tales it’s where loneliness resides. It divides and isolates. It leaves the girl with the star on her forehead looking up at twelve empty shirts on a clothesline that once contained her brothers.

“These shirts are far too small for Father. Whose are they?”

The queen replies with a heavy heart: “They belong to your twelve brothers.” Read More

Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood.

On the day before Halloween, my son’s teacher tells me, with the seriousness of a funeral director, that Noah has decided he does not want to be Peter Pan after all. Noah stands close beside her and he is dead serious, too, as if after she breaks the news he will be the one to show me the pine box where Peter Pan now sleeps. The furrow in Noah’s brow deepens and I imagine planting in it ranunculus, heliotrope, chrysanthemum. Flowers we can pick to take with us when we pay our respects to the boy he has chosen not to be. His teacher speaks in a hush. “He’s decided instead…” she says. “Shit,” I think. Unlike Wendy Darling who can sew shadows onto the foot of a boy who will never grow up, I can’t sew. But weeks before I had ordered the whole costume from Etsy: the green felt hat, the quiver and arrows, the tunic, the brown sash, the green tights. And now, at the last minute, a costume change. “Instead,” she says. “Oh god, what?” I think. “Instead,” she says, her voice growing dim, “he would like to be Martin Luther King Jr.”

I can’t say no. I mean, I could say no but then I would be the mother who told her son who wanted to be Martin Luther King Jr. that he must be Peter Pan instead. What am I supposed to say? “You can’t be Martin Luther King Jr., I already bought the green tights?” Or “I’d prefer you imagine yourself as a very, very old boy than as the most visible leader of the Civil Rights Movement?” I was cornered.

It was already three o’clock. I needed a black suit. I could draw the mustache on with eyeliner. I needed black shoes. A white button-down shirt. I dropped Noah home, and ran off to Target. I pass the girl’s department, and a T-shirt flashes at me: THE FUTURE IS FEMALE. Sorry, Nibs, Tootles, Slightly, Curly, Twin One, and Twin Two. Sorry, John and Michael. Sorry, my sons: the future is female. Sorry, Peter Pan, we’re over you.

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. 

Turns out, for three months, Eli, my five year old, had a small black pebble in his ear. Don’t ask me why it never bothered him or why I never noticed. I am only his mother. When the very old doctor gently removed the pebble, Eli said, “Oh, there you are. I was looking for you all over.”

About a week later I read about the Makapansgat pebble, a two-million-year-old reddish-brown pebble described as “water worn” with “staring eyes.” In 1925, this pebble, a pebble with a face, was found outside the vicinity of extinct hominids, implying that it was carried a good distance, as one might carry a fairy tale, because in the pebble a human recognized something and so kept it and carried it.

In Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel,” it’s not the breadcrumbs but the moonlit pebbles that point the children home. The breadcrumbs, eaten by birds, are the vanishing path that lead Hansel and Gretel to an edible house inhabited by a ravenous witch. At first, Hansel and Gretel gently nibble at the house, like mice. Then Hansel tears off a big piece of cake-roof. Then Gretel knocks out an entire sugar windowpane. The children are insatiable because what they are really hungry for is a mother and their mother is gone. Children with mothers don’t eat houses.

While I write this essay, my mother stops speaking to me. The reasons are as old as the oldest fairy tale. As old as pebbles. For days my chest feels like it’s filling up with dry leaves. My head is bricks and glass. A shattering takes up residence in my body. I am forty-three and her silence still does this to me. I want sugar. I want to sleep.

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. 

Franz Juttner, Illustration from Snow White, c.1905

The stepmother swings like a light bulb back and forth, causing the mother who is not there to glow. That is her job.

I am a mother, a stepmother, and a step-stepmother because I am my husband’s third wife and he has daughters from his first marriage and a daughter from his second. And I am a mother-mother to our two sons. “This isn’t one of your fairy tales,” my husband once said to me during an argument. He didn’t mean Disney, he meant Grimm. He meant I was stowing myself in the body of a fairy-tale stepmother and setting sail.

When all my husband’s daughters are in our house at once, I grow very small. The weight of those girls who are not mine tilts the house and slides me toward the door. The weight of my sons slides me back in. Up and down goes this seesaw. My husband takes no turns. He grows weightless and blurry.

On weekends, my seventeen-year-old stepdaughter comes out of her bedroom in the early afternoon in a thick white robe. She moves slowly, like a gathering cloud. My sons worship her. She is soft and kind, and they scramble all over her body like mice. “Play with us,” they beg. She yawns. Shuffles into the bathroom. They wait by the door. Often she is in there for a long, long time. Her name is Eve, like the first woman on earth.

I love my stepdaughter, but I don’t love being a stepmother. It’s grim work. If we stood side by side, Eve and I, and looked into the mirror, it wouldn’t be our reflections staring back at us. It would be something wild and cruel. A discarded mother skin. A punishment for loving what doesn’t belong to you. Read More

Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. 

Children’s book illustration of “Old King Cole”

“If we didn’t have rules,” I say to my sons, “we’d all be on the roof in our underpants talking to the clouds.” “But what if the rule-maker is bad? What if he hates us for no reason? What if he hates kids and brown people?”

I learned about the Nuremberg Laws as a kid in yeshiva, and I learned how those original laws bloomed and spread like a virus into more and more laws: Jews are prohibited from buying cake. Jews must surrender their fur, wool, typewriters, telephones, bicycles, cars, radios, dogs, cats, and birds. Jewish children are prohibited from going to school. And, eventually, Jews cannot exist. I think I was nine. I had a dog. I would hide her, I decided. I’d break all the laws. I’d make sure my brothers always had cake. I’d exist.

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. 

“I’m dying,” says my grandmother.

“Dying where?” I ask. “I’m coming. Don’t go anywhere before I get there.”

“I have to go,” says my grandmother.

On December 26, 2018, my grandmother, Gertrude Mark, died somewhere.

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If this were a fairy tale, I’d go look for her. Read More