The mother and her daughter

Women like me aren't supposed to have daughters like you. There aren't any fairy tales about witches having children. There's no way to carry a baby on a broom, and bubbling, boiling cauldrons are inherent infant safety hazards.

But I have always been defiant. Even though I had never heard of a mother witch, I wanted to be one.

Children need two parents—you're old enough to know that—but you were special. You were created of me and my magic alone. That is your parentage.

While I carried you, I thought you would be a copy of me, but at the end of the bloating, cravings, and messy bits, I saw I was wrong.

Because you were perfect. I knew it the second I held you for the first time. You were all beautiful, chubby curves and gummy smiles. You had ten crescents of fingernails at the ends of your slender, grasping digits and a matching set on the ends of your toes. Your eyes were bright and blue, and your hair wispy and golden.

When I looked into your eyes, I saw a destiny beyond having your own pointy hat someday. You were due for a happily ever after.

You were wrapped in my arms when I made you a promise that led us to now. I curled around you and pressed my nose to your tender head. I promised I would do all I could to get you a fairy-tale happy ending.

It began when you were a toddler. You were a tempest. You were a shriek and a howl. You catapulted between whirlwind rage and snotty caterwauling. There were brief moments of smiley sunshine between your clouds.

I didn't do it out of selfishness. I didn't do it to make my job easier as a parent. I did it because the princesses from the stories were always quiet and meek with emotions to match.

Thinking of your future, I collected your screams and your sobs slowly over a week. Every time you opened your mouth and released a tremendous noise, I caught it. I hid it away.

You were grinning and laughing unceasingly after I removed all of it. I left enough tears for you to daintily cry, but not enough to blubber. Princesses never blubbered. And they never had a snot bubble. I made sure it was the same for you.

When you got a little older, you broke things. You knocked potion bottles off tables and ripped paper out of spell books. You hugged my familiars too hard and they began avoiding you.

As I cleaned up shattered glass and shredded spells, I would breathe magic over the pieces and call out to your roughness. This I gathered and hid away, too, for princesses were gentle. How else could they be trusted with glass slippers and precious tiaras?

You began shedding your cherubic state as you moved into womanhood. You were still perfect, but some of the ways you were perfect didn't match the standards for the most beautiful in the land.

I magicked your lips to ruby red and tucked away their pink for safekeeping. I brushed the mousy brown out of your hair and let the blonde of your girlhood shine. I leached the color out of your skin, leaving it white as snow, except for the proper flushed thumbprints on your cheeks.

The nose was harder, but I spent a day molding it into a proper button shape instead of being hooked like mine. You fought me the whole time. I think you would have rather spent the day collecting wildflowers with the other village girls.

I had nothing to take or add in terms of kindness, which all of the good princesses are known for. You were naturally brimming with it.

For sixteen years, I shaped you in preparation for a happy future. I followed the rules set by the storybooks.

It was, of course, on your sixteenth birthday—princesses always discover their curses on their sixteenth birthday—that you found my hiding place.

I came home from gathering herbs, and you were sitting on the floor of my workshop. A mirror was leaning up against the wall before you.

Some witches use paintings to store other people's flaws or their own. I chose a mirror.

You didn't turn to look at me when I came in. Your blue eyes were on your reflection.

I came up behind you and knelt down. In the mirror, my gaze met yours, but it didn't feel like yours at first.

The girl in the mirror was a screaming squall. She was full of rage and other extremes of emotion. She flung her arms out erratically and haphazardly. Her appearance was pleasing, but not the stunning, soft beauty I wanted for you.

You were quiet. That worried me.

"You're not her," I whispered in your ear as I gathered your graceful frame in my arms.

"That's not me," you said. You looked at me hard in the mirror. "But if that's not me, then I'm not me, either."

I blinked.

"I'm both, mother."

I turned your words over and over. When I held them up to the light, I saw the truth in them.

"I want you to live happily ever after," I explained. "I did all of this for you."

"I want to be all of me," you said. "And I want an ending that's mine. Just mine."

My heart began to hurt. I started to want that for you, too.

Since I had stolen your roughness, I had to be the one to place the mallet in your hands. I had to give you my verbal permission to bring its head down on the mirror.

As the glass broke, so did my dreams for you, but that was the only way my daughter's dreams were allowed to begin.