Other than Sofia the First, Cydney’s favorite Disney Princess is Pocohantas. It’s her favorite princess toy to play with. Because we watch a Sing-A-Long DVD daily, she has to play with Pocohantas in water while singing Just Around the River Bend. Everything is Pocohantas.
Saturday afternoon, we were watching Disney Jr and a commercial came on advertising that the full movie would be playing at 6 that evening. I made a small event of it. I made sure Cydney had her action figure, we got popcorn, and chocolate milk for the occasion. She sat and watched the movie and was very much into it. When Just Around the River Bend played, she lost it. She had to sing it loudly as she and her action figure swooshed around in an imaginary river.
While I was watching the movie, I had a few thoughts. I thought about how a few years ago, Timile and I bought a bunch of Disney Movies. Pocohantas was Timile’s favorite. One afternoon we watched the film, and I was joking through it saying that the trees in the background was her backyard since the movie takes place not too far from where she grew up. I told her about how when my grandparents took my sister and I to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg I thought to myself “There is nothing around here! Who on earth would and would want to live here?” She laughed and said “Now you know!”
Watching the movie, I thought about the parallels between Pocohantas and Cydney and my real lives. It’s a movie about a widowed father and his daughter who constantly tells his daughter how much he reminds her of her mother and how much she would be proud of Pocohantas. Timile related to the princess a lot as well. As a military brat living in Japan, Timile told me that the kids would make fun of her. Saying that she didn’t look like her family and was adopted. They used to call her “Hopi Indian” because of her complexion and long hair that she usually had in two braids. Eventually, “Pocohantas” became her nickname. Pocohantas was her first email address, she’d use it as passwords, and they even called her that around her house. She said it was ironic that she wound up living not too far from Jamestown.
My other thought throughout the movie was my hatred for the state of Virginia. It’s a nice place, but it just left a very bad taste in my mouth that I am still not over just yet. I have forgiven Timile’s parents and accepted all that had transpired while I was there, but I still hate it’s goofy commonwealth laws and those wounds haven’t healed completely just yet (especially because things just keep coming up). Maybe that’ll change. But in the meantime, I’ll associate these things with the movie Pocohantas less and less the more times I’ll be forced to watch it.
Single Dadventures 