A Thousand Thoughts

We were watching the beginning of Frozen. I’d never actually seen the early scenes where the sisters’ parents respond to Anna being accidentally hurt by Elsa. I was kind of shocked, but not, because this is based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, right? And it’s Disney, right? Anyway, kind of shocked that after taking the sisters to see the Love Experts and Anna being healed but losing her memories of magic, the father says resolutely that Elsa can learn to control her magic, but what follows is not her learning to control it, but the father isolating her, from her sister, from the entire outside world. 

It’s bleak. Remove the opportunity for anyone to be hurt by her magic. That’s not learning to control it, that’s being controlled. He also doubles down on the shame and fear approach by telling her not to feel, and panicking when her magic leaks out in moments of emotion, urging her to basically just stuff it all down, to stop it happening at all. That’s not learning to control it, that’s being taught to be complicit in your own controlled life. 

It’s completely nauseating.

I said to the kids, carefully, curiously, because I’d only just seen this bit of the origin story, ‘Oh, so the dad said she needed to control her magic, and decided to keep her away from Anna and other people. I wonder if that was the best decision?’.

My second child, who just loves the characters of Anna, Elsa, Olaf, Christoph and Sven, and who, appropriately, isn’t grasping all that’s going on, said confidently ‘Yes. Her dad said so. Her dad said.’ 

My first child spoke and said ‘I don’t think so.’

‘What other decisions could they have made?’ I asked.

My first child spoke carefully again. ‘Practice. She could have practised so she could control it’.

Without wanting to respond too strongly, I said that I thought so too, that I thought practice and helping her learn how to use her gifts safely around other people would have been better.

My insightful, intuitively just-hearted child, deep down. Maybe he’s not connecting the conversation with his own circumstances, or maybe he is. I am. In any case, he doesn’t think that someone who has accidentally hurt someone else with their unusual gifts ought to be separated from others, but allowed to practise how to be and live, in company. And I do agree. 

[Photo ID: painting by my first child, titled (by them) ‘A Storm Clearing’. It shows a moody and textured abstract or maybe impressionistic scene where yellow is breaking through smudgy brown, red and blue.]