Some kind of fairytale: Part II

(To read Part I, click here.)

After her year with Princess, Mandy felt a need to move on and out of her job. She decided that after the hard time she had always given her father, it was only fair that she give his homeland a try. After recharging her social batteries by spending a month back in the land of Oz with all her family and friends, Mandy made the 20+ hour journey to the United Kingdom. It may have been a kingdom, but there were no princesses there. Only one very spoilt 12 year old Prince, whom Mandy catered for for a few months before escaping to London Town. There she spent the rest of the year doing a job that took no energy or intelligence, but making wonderful friends. This was her much missed college experience, and she shared it with some great roommates. But overall, her father’s homeland was cold, wet and gloomy. And Mandy decided that she could never feel at home in a place that allowed 16 year old children to smoke cigarettes.

Mandy travelled back to Oz, via Princess’s house for a month long Cali-Land summer visit. She participated in a wedding (not hers) and underwent a frustrating search for a ‘normal’ job. She eventually gave up on that search, and landed another childcare job. This job evolved into something Mandy had never expected and something that was both immensely challenging and truly rewarding. She took care of children whose parents were incapable of doing so. She learnt how take care of little people with huge, often uncontrollable emotions. She learnt how to supervise play and homework, cook and clean, role model and discipline. In short, she learnt how to be a part-time parent. Mandy worked hard, recording 120 hours of work one week, and over 70 hours many others. Dreaming, saving, and planning her return to her mother’s homeland. The faraway land that she had come to truly think of as home.

Despite the ugly, scrunched faces that the people of Oz gave her when she would announce her intended destination, 20 months after landing back in Oz, Mandy left it again. She still cried when she kissed her cats goodbye, but she left with the conviction that she was going to make this work and that she was headed to the place where she would live for a very long time to come. Now Mandy lives in the City of Angels, though she hopes to one day soon live adjacent to the City of Angels. After some more short travels, indecisions and false starts, she is now focused on winning a decent paying job providing the luxury of nanny service to the people of L.A. Until then she fills her days with a balance of the reality of job searching and the escape of music, movies, and television.

Some days Mandy feels down, not having a job to get up for in the morning or friends to meet up with in the evening. She misses the good people of Oz and her friends in the Kingdom. She struggles with the fakeness and flakiness of so many of the Angelic people who have fluttered past her. She hopes to eventually add some more people to the number of local friendlies she can count on one hand. But she reminds herself that she is indeed living her dream, though it is still a work in progress. And when that doesn’t work, she surrounds herself with the love and childlike optimism of Princess and the support of Princess’s family. She still smiles when people ask her where she’s from, or compliment her accent, as she is proud to have come from the land of Oz. But she frowns when the Angelic people assume that she is not an American and does not live here. Because, you see, she always has been and she finally does live here in this faraway land, where she is finding the way to her happily ever after.

The End.