Читать книгу Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfillment - Barbara Angelis De - Страница 14

There was nothing there! I couldn’t feel a thing in the box. No towers jutting up, no flags flying on the roof. In fact, there was no roof at all! My heart pounded as my little hands reached deeper, and deeper, until finally, at the very bottom of the box, I could feel a pile of tiny objects. I spilled out the contents of the box and there before me, littering the top of my lace bedspread, lay the two hundred and seventy-seven pieces of the Enchanted Castle, ready for assembly, along with several tubes of model glue, paint, brushes, and a twenty-four-page instruction booklet.

I sank to the floor and stared in shock at the confusing mess on my bed. I felt completely crushed. I had expected a beautiful, magical castle, and instead I’d gotten a pile of plastic parts. Now my dreams would never come true. I began to sob the deep, hopeless sobs of someone who has decided the world is a cruel and unfair place.

Just then, my mother knocked on my bedroom door, and when she heard me crying, she rushed in and took me in her arms. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” she asked with a concerned look on her face. “Aren’t you happy with your presents?”

“It’s, it’s the cc … cc … castle,” I stammered. “It’s not right.”

“What’s not right about it?” my mother questioned. “Here, let me take a look.” She got up and stood over the bed. “Let’s see, they included glue, five colors of paint, good … brushes, and here’s the instructions. Honey, everything looks O.K. to me.”

I listened to her in bewilderment. How could she say the castle looked O.K.? “But Mommy,” I sniffed, “the castle is all in little pieces. It’s not pretty and fixed like the picture on the box.”

My mother pulled me toward her and took my hands in hers. “Barbara,” she said softly, “There’s nothing wrong with the castle. It is supposed to come in pieces like that—that’s the whole idea. It’s a model and you are supposed to put it together. See, honey, here’s the instructions, they show you how to stick the pieces that fit onto one another. And then you put a little glue on them so they will stay that way, and when it is all glued together, you paint it with these paints, and you’re all finished, and the castle will look just like the one on the cover.”

“But I thought it was supposed to come already made!” I shook my head in disbelief. “You mean I have to put the whole castle together myself? That ruins the whole thing—it will never be as good as the one in the picture. And besides, because I’ll know I put it together, it won’t be magical at all!” And then I burst into more tears.