I know the About Page says quite a bit about the name of this website, and what it says and what it means; but somehow, I feel like it doesn’t quite say enough about what it needs to. It doesn’t portray the years of hope and longing to be something more significant than just a girl in Ohio. It doesn’t tell you about the agony of spending your life ‘Waiting for Fairies’.
I grew up in a tiny town in South-Western Ohio. My dad was a mechanic, of sorts, and my mom was a stay-at-home mother until my little sister was old enough to go to school full-time. Have you ever heard the term ‘welfare Christmas’? Because that was us. I think it was too far back for Toys for Tots, but I commend those people. I didn’t find it embarrassing at the time that we got gifts from the government for the holidays. I just thought it was kind of cool to get presents two days of the year. One was government-paid, and then the actual holiday when grandparents and aunts would send their own gifts. It’s vaguely embarrassing now, but there’s no real reason to be ashamed. We were poor. I got Wal-Mart clothes for school, but we had enough for supplies. I wasn’t the kid sitting in the back row of class who had to borrow pencil and paper, and didn’t even have a backpack to carry home his textbooks.
My parents learned early on that the more books they let me bring home from the library, the quieter I would be. Fights with my sister didn’t count, of course. I still remember the very first book I ever read on my own: The Swan Princess. I devoured the children’s section by third grade, and I’d gone through all of the Young Adult shelves by the middle of fifth. That means I was around ten when my mom finally started letting me borrow her Stephen King books. I tried to read Pet Cemetary, but I kept falling asleep. I shocked all my teachers when I carried in King’s 1100 page epic: It, and I shocked them again when I let them know I was actually reading it for the second time.
My mom never forbid me from reading anything I could get my hands on, though she later discouraged the occult books I picked up. Her explanation to me was this: “If you’re old enough to pick it up, you’re old enough to read it. You may not understand it, but you can always read it again when you get older.”
That’s how I got Freud while I was in middle school. Studies of religion and mythology before I was 14. But my favorites? Science fiction, and especially fantasy. LJ Smith, Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, David Eddings– and dozens upon dozens of others. Everything with one of those blue “fantasy” labels on the spine were fair game. I searched through the adult fiction, the YA section, everything. I’d say that I read them all, but they were always adding more, so I can’t say for sure. It was quite a lot, for a small county library, anyway.
Everything I’d read just compounded in my head, and I wondered what was going to be special about me. I read fanciful accounts of kids picking up books in the library on ‘So You Want to Be A Wizard’? There were stories of young women being wisked away to save an alternate reality. People with special abilities: Everything from fire magic to telekinesis.
And I wanted it.
I wanted the magic, the purpose, the ability to be something other than I was. I think I’ve spent at least two decades wondering when it would be my time to be ‘special’. The wanting faded, eventually, from wanting some fantastic life, to wanting to just be something more than normal. Then, I realized that the feeling is normal. Everyone wants to make a mark. Everyone wants to be something special. The difference between wanting and being, is doing.
So this website is me doing. I’m reshaping my life, striving after that goal to be something special, someone who makes her mark on the world. I guess that when I got married, I realized that one part of my life had finally come together. I no longer needed to devote time and energy to being absolutely perfect in order to ‘catch a man’.
Tip: That’s not how I caught mine anyway!
Essentially, for the first time ever, I was 100% content with one portion of my life. Why wasn’t I content with the rest of it? What could I do to fix that? That’s what I spent a long time asking myself. I’m still trying to figure out the complete answers. This site is a journey, not an ending. It’s my admission to myself. Waiting for fairies to come whisk you away to the Ever After doesn’t happen in our world. If you want magic, light, mystery, happiness and contentment… You have to go out looking for it. And that’s what Waiting for Fairies is all about.
