“Mom, read me a story tonight.”

“Well OK, I will read you a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.”

I opened the book to wherever the giant book of fairy tales would take me. I just  happened to open the book to Ferdinand the Faithful. I sat underneath the white metal bunk bed on the red futon and began to read the story to my son.

Of course my head was racing with thoughts while reading the story to him. Tomorrow is going to be my son’s first day in middle school.

This was as strange to me as the fairy tale I was reading. Here there are talking fish and talking white horses with magic pens and keys to open up a castle standing on a heath. A heath what is that? Oh yes, a tract of open and uncultivated land.

That is what I was feeling, uncultivated land? My eleven year old is going to make a new start away from me on a new adventure, and unless I find an invisible cloak tonight to follow him, I must let him go on his journey … alone.

I am hopeful because Ferdinand made friends and they helped him along his adventure while riding his white horse. He even outsmarted  the bully Ferdinand the Unfaithful.

Life is like a fairy tale. I have taught my son much of what he needs to know about life. The story helps too, it  even eased the tension in me and  helped my son go to sleep.

 If he is honest,  helpful and strong my son will have meat for the giants and bread for the birds. He will have a flute to call the fish for help.

“He, however always rode on his white horse, and once when he was seated on it, it told him that he was to go on to the heath which he knew and gallop three-times round it. And when he had done that, the white horse stood up on its hind legs, and was changed into a King’s son.”

~ Ferdinand the Faithful, Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales. Fall River Press