Leave Mother Hubbard Alone!

Today I caught the dastardly butchering of a nursery rhyme, on a children's channel. In a little storytime interlude between shows, a young mother read her son's favorite nursery rhyme. It went:

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone
And when she got there she thought the cupboard was bare
But then on the top shelf she found one

What the hell? Honestly, that makes me want to go on a Lewis Black apoplectic vituperative, making sure I say 'fuck!' enough times to restore the balance of things.

I understand that telling gentler versions of old stories is nothing new. In the Red Riding Hood tale that we know, huntsman hero swoops in, takes wolf down and frees little Red. However, in earlier versions there is no happy ending, and the wolf bests the people. It is a rather grisly cautionary tale, that involves Grandma's blood in some versions, according to a quick Wikipedia search. Generally speaking, fairy tales that we know are tamer, full of people eating and big bad creatures who weren't always slain in the end.

But, are children to be so coddled that a bare cupboard is too much? The horror of a bare cupboard must be effaced, for fear that it might bruise a child's precious, crystal thin sensibility. 'She thought the cupboard was bare' - seriously.

Ordinarily, I would keep my annoyance on this point to myself, except that in my role as aunt I have been privy to some of the intense, anxious detail magnification of parenting. Privileged parenting, to be exact. A pathologizing stance, it's an intense hyper-vigilance that ups the ante on every little detail. I suspect that this sanitized nursery rhyme has something to do with the tendency to overpraise and coddle children, and pressure on parents to be perfect. Anything less than perfection, anything like real life, will scar their children forever, is the fear.

A bone in Mother Hubbard's cupboard, to allay fears in an age of overanxious parenting.