Maven Fairy Godmother

I’ve come to a hard decision. I have to cut a subplot to make the novel work better, so it’s good-bye to Tulip and Jones, for now.

I’ll be revising the scenes so that Maven will act them out, and Jones will have to fall through the Veil at another time, unless I decide to get him together with Maven sooner.

I’m not throwing them on the cutting room floor, however. They will have to wait for the next book to be fleshed out, but I want to get this done now and get the next two books started, After Midnight and That Darn Maven.

So long, Jones and Tulip. See you later.

Ashleigh moped in her room in the third tallest tower of her sister’s castle. Her satin slipper dangled from her toe. Her finger traced patterns on the rock of the open window. Her silken gown crumpled as she curled up and stared sightlessly out the window.

“I wish, I wish,” she whispered. “I wish I knew what to wish for.” She didn’t blame Pierre for leaving her. She was tired of catering anyway, though she didn’t know how to do anything else. Her sister had kindly taken her in and treated her as a noble lady, even though everyone knew that Ashleigh was only a silk-gowned kitchen maid.

“I’m doomed to be a secondary character.” She put her arms around her silk-stocking knees and poked out her lower lip. “If only I had chosen the prince, I’d be the queen now.”

“Unfortunately,” said Maven, appearing with a minimum of flash and sparkle, “it is impossible to grant a wish for the past. You have to decide what you want in the future.”  She glanced around at the tapestries, the well hung bed, the carpet on the floor. The view from the tower included a forest and a lake where the sun sparkled on the water. “Looks like you’re doing all right to me.”

Ashleigh sprang to her feet. “YOU!” she shouted, pointing a quivering finger at Maven as her face turned red. “Why do I always get you? Aren’t there any other fairy godmothers?”

“Not on your case. In fact, there is a shortage. So you’re stuck with me.” Maven held up her wand. “Now if you don’t know what you want, I’ll just….”

“No, wait. Wait!” Ashleigh grabbed Maven’s sleeve. “You rushed me last time, and I didn’t get what I wanted!”

Maven pulled the gossamer from Ashleigh’s hand before Ashleigh could stretch it out of shape. Maven snapped her fingers, and a list appeared in her hand: “bath, dress, horses with white feathers on their heads, coachmen, coach, glass slippers, food you didn’t have to cook.”  She handed the list to Ashleigh. “I can only give you what you ask for. It’s a rule.”

“But I did ask for what I wanted.” Ashleigh leaned back on the window seat. “It just didn’t work out right.” She hung her head and picked at her perfect fingernail.

“I offered you the second chance if you came back by midnight.” Maven shrugged. “You made your choices. It was out of my hands.”

“But why are you here now?”

“You said the magic words.” Maven raised her wand to poof out. “I thought you might have a true wish this time. When you figure out what you want, wish for me.”  She poofed.

Ashleigh stood speechless for a moment, but she began thinking about what she did want, and it wasn’t the third tallest tower. But she would have to be more careful this time, not to be tricked into making a bad decision.

“That’s what happens when you don’t think about one wish, but just wave your wand over everything,” Fiona said, with a smirk. “What are you going to do about it, since you now know how powerful you are, and you’ve learned that no one else can undo your hasty and ill-formed magic?”

Fiona stood there with her arms folded, tapping a black wand against her shoulder. She didn’t usually handle her wand unless she was casting a spell. She never just played with it like that. The crockery on her shelves seemed uneasy too, though they often vibrated or rattled. Today they seemed to shrink back as far from the edges of the shelves as they could get, huddling together, backs to the wall.

Maven swallowed. She really didn’t want to get the amphibian perspective, even though she had just doomed a number of people–dozens–to that fate this morning and was not sure how to change them back. “I don’t know what to do. I really didn’t mean to transform so many of them this morning, but they were going to be crushed in the crowd. They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“That was the first smart thing you have done since you came here.”  Fiona leaned back on her desk, her wand pointing at the floor, the tip of it inscribing small circles that sparkled for an instant before fading. “Now they remember why they don’t come running to magic to solve their problems. Magic makes things worse, unless carefully and sparing applied.”

“What have you seen in your crystal ball?” Maven hoped Fiona would go and look, that she would stop playing with the wand that seemed more and more ominous every moment.

“I haven’t looked,” Fiona said. “I’ve been listening to you and your story, and this ridiculous situation, which is now all yours. It’s up to you to sort it out.” She crossed her arms, with the tip of the wand still moving, as if it had a will of its own. “What are you going to do about it?”

Maven listened for any suggestion from Bump of Direction, but got no sense of even having intuition, much less anything helpful, except to get out of Fiona’s office and see if she could think more clearly away from Fiona and her wand.

“I’m going back out there and muddle through.”  Without waiting for any sort of instruction or orders, since it appeared there would be none, she took out her wand, swizzled it and poofed back to the grounds of the Palace.

Jones landed on his belly in a flower bed—petunias from the smell of it—never a good sign. But the Ions were gone, his brain sparkles mere ash which filled his mouth.

He made a few tentative moves to see if anything was broken, other than the flower stalks beneath him.  It was dark, always good, and the flower bed edged a path to a small cottage where the candle light from inside seemed both warm and welcoming.

The girl who came out on the porch did not. “YOU there! What are you doing in my flowers? Get up!”

Jones found his knees and scrambled up, wiping the sticky, ruined flowers from his chest. “I’m very sorry. I…got lost….” He glanced at the cottage and the dark woods surrounding it. “I saw your light and….I must have tripped…”  That was certainly true in one sense, and the flashbacks were getting closer together.

He took a closer look at the girl, who though short was not a girl at all, but a woman of substance, muscle, even menace. In her left hand was a lantern, but in the right was a dwarf sword half as long she was.  Standing on the porch, four steps up, she was still below Jones’s eye level, though he was a few inches shy of six feet tall. He looked into her eyes, but her ample bosom was directly in his line of sight, nestled snugly in her quilted bodice covered with chain mail.

“Why were you in the woods at this time of night?” She moved the lantern to see him better, keeping the sword pointed at his most tender spot. “Are you out of your mind?”

Jones didn’t have an answer, and standing up so quickly took its toll on his already stressed body. He smiled, gestured towards her to begin a plausible lie, and then passed out  face first on the path.

The lanky undead considered the question posed by the chubby and hardly fearless fairy godmother before him.

“What do vampires wish for? To end the bloody boredom. Decades of the same old hunt and suck, dodge the prey in the day, bite the blighter in the night.

“If you do fall in love with one of the prey, you basically see how long you can wait it out for them to die–of natural causes or of you, whether you finally decide make them or not.  Ennui. Tedium. And double such, if you do make one of them, as being undead always changes a person in ways you don’t expect.  While there might be undying love, it doesn’t appear to be between the undead.

“It’s fun at first, especially making a new identity every few years, setting up Swiss bank accounts and such, but it wears on one’s nerves, always having to move on and on after culling the herd in a particular area. Some poor sods are as bad at death as they were in life, but at least they have no bills, no debts, or none that anyone can collect. They just bumble around, whining to anyone who will listen, and thinking of watching the last sunrise.

“There’s no fun in anything after a while, especially when you just can’t feel anything any more except the thirst, and eventually that too goes away. Life is wasted on the living, whose dull senses can’t smell the death in every rose, every breeze, every musician whose work scrapes across the eardrum. Even robots grind their bearings away and click their endless popping and fizzing circuits.

“I’ve tried to be one of those ‘righteous’ types who only take out drug dealers and whatever definition one might have of lowlife scum, but bankers just taste better than junkies.  I suppose I do my bit to clean up the gene pool too, sometimes taking out the whole family, one at a time, especially the younger ones, before they can breed.

“I’m not into killing innocent animals, and the closest I can imagine being a vegetarian is slurping an emergency pint of green coconut milk. Shudder. But then I can hardly worry about starving to death, and madness is not very far from where I live with my healthy dose of paranoia and my penchant for the nightlife and underworld. The Shadow does know what evil lurks in the hearts of men:  me.

“So what can you do for me, fairy godmother? You can’t kill me, you can’t make me fall in love, and I can see through any glamour you can throw over me.” His eyes gave her the piercing look that was usually followed by his piercing kiss.

“You’re right of course,” Maven said. “If you don’t know what you want, I certainly can’t give it to you. It’s a rule.”

The words weren’t coming out of Lurleen’s pen onto her purple spiral notebook with college ruled pages. She’d come in early on a Tuesday, knowing that it would be slow until after seven, so she would have some writing time.

Plenty of time but no words. She couldn’t bear to write down the mundane things that happened in her life,  the divorce, the miscarriage, the  family’s redneck crudities, even the small dramas of the bar that sometimes ended in bloodshed. That was too real. She wanted to escape into another world, one that made more sense, where the good guys looked different from the bad guys.

She sighed in despair until someone walked through the wall of the Café O’Lay.

Lurleen stared at the wall at the corner of the bar near the bathrooms, where the old projector room had been when the café had been the concession stand at the drive-in, back when Lurleen was a little girl. It was a plain cinderblock wall, many times painted but showing every impact of bullet, chair and redneck skull. The woman had walked right through it, just like it was a beaded curtain.

The woman was chubby, dressed like a fairy in lavender gossamer that draped and flowed around her, making her look like a cross between an ancient hippie chick and a salvation army lingerie counter. She had dragonfly wings that vibrated and buzzed every so often. She appeared to be fifty-ish with some wrinkles and, short salt and pepper hair. She could have been anyone’s aunt–probably the cheek-pinching kind.

The woman hitched her hip up on a bar stool.  “While you are deciding what you want to wish for, you can get me a beer. Draft. Guinness if you got it.”

Lurleen’s professional habits kicked in while her brain refused to process what was going on. She grabbed a mug, filled it and handed it over. “Want a tab?”

The woman didn’t answer at once. She was too busy sucking down the beer. When she came up for air, she said, “Sure. Now about that wish. You only get one, so think carefully.”

Maybe I’m dreaming, or this is some kind of flashback, Lurleen thought. She’d been heavy into the drug scene in college, but that was years ago. She didn’t even drink now, not even coffee, coke or sweet tea. She wet her hand at the sink and wiped the cold water over her face. The woman quaffed the rest of her beer and held out the mug for more.

“Okay, who are you, and how did you get through the wall?” Lurleen took the mug and filled it back up, though she had a premonition that the beer would never be paid for, not even in fairy gold.

“Maven’s my name. I’m your fairy godmother,” Maven said. She turned to look at the wall behind her. She fished a wand out of a hidden pocket in her gossamer and waved it across the wall. “I’m not sure how I got here. Must be some kind of dimensional door.” She walked over to the wall and ran her hand across it. “Interesting. Maybe you have to make your wish before I can go back.” She came back to the bar and sat on a stool. She didn’t seem at all concerned, except that she reached for her mug.

Lurleen pulled the mug back, out of reach. “You got any money on you? I believe in what I can see and feel for myself, some chick who promises wishes.”

“Fair enough,” Maven said. “Clients aren’t supposed to pay for their wishes. She dug back into her pocket and brought something out. She blew dust off it and wiped it off with a corner of her sleeve. “Twenty bucks do me for a while? Of course, the piece might be worth more as gold.”

She handed Lurleen a twenty-dollar gold piece, dated MCMVII–1907, with the figure of Liberty holding a flame and a branch.  The back said United States of America. It looked real enough. Lurleen bit it, although she wasn’t sure what that was supposed to prove. She handed the beer to Maven. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s the deal?”

“You were wishing hard enough that I heard you all the way to Faery–which isn’t so far away from here.” Maven cradled the sweating mug in her hands and sucked down the beer as if it were the last water for 500 miles.  “So what do you want? Books? How many and what subjects?” She brought out her wand again and waved it over the bar. A stack of books appeared, some hard backs, some paperbacks, all over two inches thick, all with bright covers that proclaimed Lurleen Snipes much larger than the titles. The subject matter was hidden in the graphic design.

“Wait, no! I want to write them.” Lurleen pushed them away, although the feel of of her name in red foil letters under her fingertips was hard to resist.

“So, write.” The books disappeared. “You want a bestseller.  Just give the word.” Maven drained the mug. “If that’s what you want.” Her voice had an edge of warning, just a note of ‘be careful what you ask for.’

What Lurleen wanted was to get away, to live out there in the world where life made some sense but to make it this time. She’d failed out of college, she’d failed out of marriage, she’d failed out of motherhood, and she wasn’t even much good as a barmaid in her momma’s whorehouse. She couldn’t face leaving this hellhole and then having to come home again with her tail tucked and her ears pinned back.

Maven handed her the mug, nodding at it significantly. “Take your time. There ain’t no beer in Faery.”

Re-spinning traditional tales is its own genre, with lovely twists like those in Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s  Godmother trilogy,  or Mercedes Lackey’s The Fairy Godmother from her Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms.  Tanith Lee has her Red as Blood, and Sherri S. Tepper tells Beauty‘s tale.  Movies like Ella Enchanted, Shrek, and The 10th Kingdom braid old stories together into new tapestries.

Are there any tales other than Cinderella that have not been sufficiently mined, smelted, recast, spun and hammered?

I heard today that the Beast of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is the most watched movie hero-lover of all time, including Erroll Flynn, Clarke Gable, Paul Newman, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp.  What that says for the future of little girls everywhere is a bit frightening, but that story could take some more twists, as could Rapunzel, Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood, and in some of the older versions, the less cute ones..  I’d like to see some of the less popular tales retold–Vasalisa the Brave, Tattersails, The Master Maid,  The She-Bear, the Armless Maiden, stories of girls who lived their own lives and saved the day for their homes and husbands to be.

What tales would you have retold?

The first rule of granting wishes is “Be careful what you wish for–you might get it.”

Three themes exist in the make-a-wish stories:

• the one wish that sets the machinery of the universe in motion
• the unthinking wish that must be corrected by the last wish
• the no-matter-what-you-wish, it will turn out badly–the monkey’s paw wish.

Cinderella and Aladdin are able to wish for what they want, and having put a wedge of magic into their lives, their circumstances change.  Cinderella has only the one wish, and she must do what she can to make things work out,  at least in the Perrault-Disney versions. In older variations, she and her many sisters, such as Catskin, must appear to the prince three times in ever finer finery,  and still resort to trickery to get around the evil of her enemies. But there is no problem with the wish itself. She gets what she asks for, and the story goes from there.

Aladdin gets sucked into a evil plot and by his own trickery manages to get out of it with the help of the genie. All he really needs is the wealth to get the girl–a mirror opposite of Cinderella. In the Disney version, he must choose between what he desires and what he has promised–to let the genie out of the bottle for ever.  Giving the genie back his own life seems like the obvious choice, if the genie can be trusted to be his friend, but Aladdin does not know that.  He does honor his promise, however, and the genie is then able to help him much more than would have been possible with one last wish.  This is one of few stories where the modern version shows more moral fiber than the traditional story, and it shows the genie as a character (Robin Williams!) rather than a plot device.

More traditional stories show a  man finding the genie’s bottle and only escaping with his life because he tricks the genie into going back into the bottle. The genie has vowed to kill the person who releases him, ostensibly so that he will be free of a master,  but his arrogance and pride get him put back in the bottle, which the man throws back into the sea.

Another variation, both of the wish and of the magical animal helper variety, has a fisherman being granted a  wish because he releases the magical fish he has caught.  The fish grants a number of wishes for the fisherman’s wife, each time to be more powerful and grand.  Each time the fisherman is more uncomfortable with the changes in his life as he must behave as a more and more powerful person, and he begs his wife to be content. But when his wife is not satisfied being empress and wants to be a god, the fish makes them go back to being poor, and the fisherman is happy again.

The wishing-for-too- much-story is reflected in the stupid wishes story. A person is granted three wishes for doing some kindness to a magical being, but when the person and spouse try to decide what to wish for,  they get into an argument and waste their opportunity.  In one variation, the man only wishes for a better dinner than he usually gets, which makes the wife angry, so she wishes that his dinner–usually a sausage–would be stuck to his nose. The last wish, of course, brings them back to where they were, no richer and no wiser.

The darkest version of the wish gone wrong is the Monkey’s Paw story,  where the magical token is given to the person, with a warning that it is dangerous, but without explanation of how it is dangerous.  In each case the  wish is granted, but under terrible circumstances. The man wishes to have a sum of money, but it is the death of his son that results in the money coming to him. The wife is in such grief that she wishes her son alive again, after being buried for two weeks,  and only int he nick of time, the man wishes the son back in his grave and at piece, while the zombie corpse is hammering on the front door to be let in. While the initial wish was not particularly foolish or greedy, the consequences leave the people worse off than before, a cautionary tale. Be careful what you wish for.

While the fairy godmother story usually only tells of the first kind of wish,  most of the stories do not tell much about what happens after the wish. At most, three days go by, and then the prince is able finally, to recognize or find his princess, and all is well, happily ever after.  But few stories really tell the tale of what happens after midnight when everything goes back to what it was, or discusses how the person is different for having had the wish experience, how the rest of the prince’s household deals with the new princess or what happens after happily ever after.

That’s what fiction is for.  And that’s why the realm of Fiction is such a threat to Fiona. Faery is being swallowed up with the elaborated tales that explore what happens when you get what you wish for.

"Nixe" by Margret Hofheinz-Döring / Galerie Brigitte Mauch Göppingen

What is it about frogs in fairy tales? They are green and slimy, with big staring eyes and wide gaping mouths, and they make burping noises in the night.  Kissing one is hardly appealing, making them a favorite curse of evil fairies and witches, who know that a kiss can hold a power beyond any other kind of magic, if it conveys love.

Numerous stories tell of princes and princesses turned into water creatures, and of fish who are magical helpers when they are treated kindly. Usually a magical kiss, and the acknowledgment of love will break the spell–short of throwing the frog against the wall.

However, once a reader gets past the fairy tales that have been cleaned up to be moral tales for children, one finds a tremendous body of material on various kinds of water beings. One of these is the water nixie–a.k.a.  knucker, neck, sprite, sylph, siren, Lorelei, mermaid, melusine, or water-man, depending on the language and the culture where the stories originate. Like the magical fairyland,  people envisioned an under water kingdom separate from but parallel to the dry land world, such as the realm of Poseidon, king of the seas or the underground realm of the dwarves and earth sprites.

But it isn’t easy being green. Ask any Jenny Greenteeth–one name of such water creatures. This one appears in Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men as the heroine’s first adversary, and she is fairly easily conquered with an iron frying pan.

The majority of such stories are cautionary tales, warning people (probably children and non-swimmers)  away from water, as the water beings would lure the unsuspecting human into the water to drown, mostly with malice, but sometimes with only the desire for company.  Water-people are often shape-shifters, both changing from fish or snakes to humans, but sometimes to other things as well, such as treasure.  Insome cases the water-folk have no specific shape at all, but like Odo in Deep Space Nine, are basically liquid.

A well-known version is the Greek sirens, who use their beautiful voices lure sailors with to wreck their ships on the rocks of the island. Another version is the Rhine maidens or the Lorelei, who live in the Rhine. The Ring Cycle of Wagner is based on the Theft of the Rhinegold which is cursed and brings the destruction of all who own it until it is all returned to the Rhine–much like the gold of the Aztecs in Pirates of the Caribbean.

One tale explains the red water lilies in a German lake as being stained by the blood of a girl who committed suicide rather than keep her father’s bargain to be the bride of the water-man who provided the fish that the family ate.

Several stories, such as that of Melusine,  reflect the selkie legends,  without the theft of the sealskin,  where the water-woman falls in love with a human and provides wealth and sometimes even a magical castle, with the proviso that he allow her a day of complete privacy once a week, and that he never watches as she births their children. Of course, the husband eventually must satisfy his curiosity, and learns that she is a mermaid who must get back into the water and her natural form. In one case, the ghost of the nixie still haunts the castle and can be seen every seven years, either as a woman or as a snake with a gold key in her mouth. Retrieving the key both sets her free and brings her power to the rescuer if she is his bride.

"Stromkarlen" by Ernst Josephson 1884

People lured by the water-folk don’t always drown. The nixie can be convinced or tricked into giving up the person stolen by offering her items of gold–comb, spinning wheel, mirror.  Other times, the person can get away from the nixie by throwing similar items behind them as they run away, which causes the items to become forests, mountains and other obstacles.

In other stories, the nixie, or sometimes a troll, is scared away from a village inn or grain mill when  he comes to cook a meal (uninvited) at the solstice or new year. Everyone is afraid of the nixie except a man and his performing bear, who are too tired to travel on.  The nixie teases the bear, which attacks the nixie and drives it away.  Later on, the nixie asks the owner of the mill or inn if he still has the “big cat” and never bothers the village again. Yet, the nixie and the man are on speaking terms and apparently see each other occasionally.

In a few stories, the nixie can be coaxed to teach the human to play music with the proper enticement–blood, a black animal, or vodka. The music may be to lure people, but it may also just be part of the lifestyle of the nixie, which can be presented as having more fun than the humans do–much like fairies in general where the party goes on forever and the road never ends.

Other legends, which don’t quite have all the pieces of a complete story, speak of the water-people who come to market bringing their flour and butter for sale just as the human people do, but who can be recognized by their red caps and the wet hems of their pants and skirts. Why they wear red caps is a mystery. Was Little Red Riding Hood (a.k.a. Red Cap in the Grimm version) really a nixie?  These folks don’t menace anyone, but the prices of their goods predict the future prices–if they sell high, prices go up, but if they sell low, prices go down. How they manage to grow flour and cows under the water is not explained

Some water-women are beneficial in other ways, such as the Lady of the Lake of Avalon in the Arthurian cycle.

This would be the time to get all Freudian and Jungian, musing on the unconscious and the anima, the intuitive and the psychic, or to consider the water-ape theory of evolution, as a race memory of  living in the edge of the waters, like manatees, or even of being in the womb surrounded by water. But  I won’t go there–others have already worked that field, adding to the fascination of the beings that live in the water.

I think we all need to believe in a different, less mundane life than the one we lead, and the fantastic creatures of alien worlds give us more scope for imagination.

Sources:

Neck, Water Nixie, and others, Scandinavian Mythology from Wikipedia

Sacred Texts – http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfm/tfm056.htm

Ashliman, D.

Water Spirit Legends 1 http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/water.html

Water Spirit Legends 2 http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type4050.html

The Water Nix,  Sur La Lune  http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/79waternix.html

When I started doing research for Maven, most of the fairy tales I knew involved girls who were set upon by their stepmothers, girls who had no mothers present. Even Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is separated from her mother, to be raised by three silly fairies. Cinderella, Snow White, Beauty, Rapunzel, and even Little Red Riding Hood were separated from their mothers.

Boys too are often motherless, such as the youngest son in many tales,  Peter Pan,  and even Harry Potter. Others, like Jack and the Beanstalk, may have an ineffectual mother who has not been able to impart any sense into her son.

Many of the women I know from the Boomer generation seem to have mother-issues. I wonder how much of this is based on the image of the Evil Older Woman: stepmother-witch.

If you watch fantasy/sci-fi TV and movies, you’ll see that there are few mothers present. They tend to fall into three categories: the golden anima of the entire series (Martha Kent on Smallville),  the wicked witch of the series (Angela Petrelli of Heroes), or comic relief (both Sheldon’s and Howard’s mothers on The Big Bang Theory).  Mothers in fairy tales are dead.  This robs the protagonist of guidance and support, so he or she enters the story with naiveté and innocence, vulnerable to evil.

Bruno Bettleheim and Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggest that these dead,  “too-good mothers” represent the child’s desire to return to infancy, to being held, nursed and closely attended by a mother–or even a desire to return to the womb.  The real mother, the one who has her own life to lead, her own issues, is seen as the evil one, the one who says “no,” or “go to bed” or “do your homework.”  The conflict between child and mother is not negotiated in fairy tales, the child does not learn how to be an adult among older adults.

How hard it is to become one’s own self, yet at some point to see one’s mother’s face in the mirror. How hard it is to allow one’s child to grow into his or her true self, without withdrawing approval or trying to control.

Perhaps our cultural fear of the older woman comes from this story motif–the anxiety of separation that begins with the terrible twos, and never really ends. Maybe it has to do with the idea that a woman loses her value with her fertility–women are the only mammals that survive their fertility.  Perhaps it is because our great-grandmothers did not often live to see 40, especially if they had many children.

A girl born today is likely to live into her 80s or even longer, but many of the Depression babies are still around, approaching their 80s,  and the Boomer girls are entering their 60s. Nobody expected that we would live this long–Social Security was never set up for people to be retired for as many years as they worked.

Will our motherless child stories begin to reflect the very large and growing numbers of grandmothers in our society? It is speculated that the appearance of the grandmother–someone who at 30 was elderly enough to have seen an entire generation grow up and begin a new generation–was a factor in the development of civilization.

What would a preponderance of grandmothers create?  Not to mention Fairy Godmothers?