This video is the song, “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from the original 1950’s animated Cinderella (one a lot of us grew up on). Ilene Woods is the woman who sang the original song for Cinderella in the movie. Here she’s on the Perry Como television show. Click here for lyrics.

Before I met Alpha Hubby, I didn’t think I was “all that” but I had learned that I deserved to be treated with respect and pure love. I did not deserve to be abused. I did not deserve to be cheated on with the entire town’s female population. I did not deserve any “mean scheming manipulating alcoholic-drugged-up verbally vicious mess who blamed everything wrong in his life on me or the weather or the mama or the abusive dad or the job or the boss or the car or the apartment or the bills” or the whatever.

I deserved peace in my life. I deserved to be treated like I was precious, valuable, worth the trouble, someone’s dream.  And I wasn’t going to accept less than that. I had major attitude. And on the outside, people accepted that at face value.

But, you know what? Deep inside, very well hidden behind the attitude and bravery, tucked in beside my heart with other unfulfilled dreams, there was a teeny tiny spark of something nebulous. A little unnamed hope – a dream – that maybe there could be True Love for me. That someone could see “me” and love me. It was a fragile light that a whiff of doubt could have extinguished.

So along comes Alpha Hubby, standing in the office cubicle opening, smiling at me. Talking in that smooth drugging voice that lulled me into forgetting I had walls up. A snake charmer. A Pied Piper. Before I knew it, I would follow him anywhere. Walls? They crumbled, slowly but surely. Not easily but thoroughly.

He respected me. He respected me so much he asked my permission to kiss me the first time he did (oh my gosh, who does that??). He was old-fashioned, courting me, careful of my feelings, protective of my heart, and letting me know he was hot after my body (well, he was human, after all) but he refused to have it until after the wedding ceremony. (He knew my heart so well. And he swears he has only been that man with me.)

He gave me everything I’d never experienced before – as many romantic gestures as he could cram into the 7 weeks before we married. No one had ever courted me before. No one had ever written me love notes and letters. No one had ever sent flowers. No one asked about, then listened, to my dreams.  No one believed in me like he did and does.

And along the way, he built me up, helped me heal and he is everything I ever dreamed of in a knight in shining armor – only better – because I didn’t know. I didn’t know what a real man’s true love was like. How could I have dreamed of something I didn’t know existed? And how did it come true?

And unlike Cinderella, who was told by her Fairy Godmother**, “Yes, my child, but like all dreams, well, I’m afraid this can’t last forever. You’ll have only ’til midnight, and then… On the stroke of twelve, the spell will be broken, and everything will be as it was before”

unlike Cinderella – my fairy tale is still being written.

HAPPY 24th ANNIVERSARY, baby!
(3/4/94)

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality
is finally better than your dreams.”  — Dr. Seuss

♥

*A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes – Disney’s Cinderella
**Quote from Cinderella (1950)