"Princess Tea Party" by Mary Soon Lee, Frequent Contributor

Princess Tea Party

Mary Soon Lee

Three days after the party

I threw out the rose

they presented to my daughter

as she sat in her princess dress,

holding her brand-new princess doll.

     

Easy to discard the rose,

but not the memory

of twenty little girls

with pink tiaras in their hair:

fat girls and thin girls,

quiet girls and chatterboxes,

sipping apple juice tea

from twenty tiny cups;

twenty would-be princesses

waiting through the stories

and the songs

and the presents

for Her, the Princess Aurora,

and then the minute,

or less than a minute,

that she spent at each table,

smiling for her pay.

     

What happened to me?

What turned me into a collaborator

in that festival of pink,

I who had thought my daughter

would play with rockets,

climb trees in jeans?

     

Now, under my daughter's spell,

I tell myself

there was nothing wrong

with her pretending

the princess would lift her

into a fairy tale;

and nothing wrong

with my pretending

that all twenty little girls

would grow up

to be engineers.

Poet's Notes:  I wrote this poem after attending a Princess Tea Party with my then four-year-old daughter at Disney. It was a bizarre event, with a crowd of little girls in fancy dresses riveted by a woman playing the part of a fairytale princess.

The first draft of the poem was too long. I trimmed it down a few years ago and then trimmed it further a few months ago. Sometimes it takes a while before I can consider my poems with detachment.

In the meantime, Lucy has grown to a marvelous eleven-year-old. She no longer plays with dolls, rarely wears pink, and has listened to "Hamilton: An American Musical" approximately five hundred times.