LET IT GO from FROZEN. Story by Caitlin Farrugia.

Living room, now and 1996

There are adults who are, like, legitimately into Disney and I’ll be honest with you, for a long time, I was a dick about it. I totally judged a non-ironic Cinderella top, a Lilo and Stitch notebook used seriously at a meeting. I’d like to apologise, I get it now. You’re not just a thirty-eight year old with a phone case that says “I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!” for no reason.

‘Frozen’ is on in our house every day. I’m not a bad mum, by the way. That statement is a little bit for you and a little bit for me. Yes, sometimes the whole film but typically my son’s favourite scene on loop: The ‘Let It Go”’ song. This is where Elsa, after fleeing vilification, builds a castle from ice magic and twenty years of holding all her shit in. She steps into her actual power and metamorphoses into her true self who she was never allowed to be. It is profound. It kills me.

My son’s favourite Elsa costume is that sick as Eurovision-chic sparkling blue and white dress with the long snowflaked veil. He performs the entire song as Mediterranean-Elsa—notably the part where she charges forward singing that she is definitively done with being a good girl and without fail, I lose it, every time. Actually, I have been losing it throughout the whole song but it is this crescendo that has me uncontrollably sobbing.

How can I explain? It’s 1996 and there are thirteen kids posing at a princess party. We’re all the same age as my son is now. Everyone is in pink billowing skirts and faux-corsets and golden crowns. Then there is me, in red and blue, docs not plastic slippers, very aware of how comparatively hairy, and therefore disgusting, I am. In the picture, I’m smiling, of course, all the same. There is a chance of surviving parenthood if I could just stop projecting, but—

—What’s more? Do you even know what it was like for Elsa? My god man, her parents were so afraid of her power they legit kept her locked in a room 24/7. She sings it—“conceal, don’t feel”—and it’s like, exactly, mate, one hundred percent. It’s lifelong gendering, having to correct as “good”, quashing any natural bodily inclination to shoot ice from your palms. It’s the shame and silence of your dangerous home life (Elsa and I share the exact same number of years captive, spooky). And, harrowingly, it’s the invisible labour of motherhood and the system that hates you. It’s trying to show your kids that you are human too but also not letting them see just how extreme your rumination is over things like the ‘Frozen’ soundtrack. It’s all of that dying while smiling, the rage beneath it, but then the explosion, the rebirth into someone who “can’t hold it in anymore”.

So to hear my son passionately sing lines like “that perfect girl is gone” stirs something deep in me. The strength of that language, the radical Elsa mythology—it’s carried in my son’s heart. This passing down of awareness seems vital, an intention for something liberatory. There are no hidden powers in our house. It’s glorious to watch and I am buckled at the knees by his beauty, how empowered he is, what it means for him, for me, for humanity. Nothing is without projection, everything is relational and interconnected. And so there we are: a kid in a polyester costume passionately  singing his lungs out and a grown arse woman doing the same in the throes of a massive breakdown.

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