"Once upon a time" is supposed to carry us somewhere safely far away, but Mary F. C. Pratt's poem trips over its own opening: "Once upon a time, it isn't easy / to please mothers." The formula belongs to the past, while the verb sits firmly in the present. In a single line the poem warns us that these old stories are not finished. The pressures they describe are still going on, and the "you" addressed throughout is anyone who has tried to live up to someone else's idea of a daughter.
The central idea is that such expectations are contradictory, endless and, in the end, physically damaging. The mothers want everything, and the demands cancel one another out. You should have "stayed in school for a PhD / or at home with so many children / or both." That deadpan "or both" is the joke, and it is also the trap: whatever you choose, someone is disappointed.
The poem is built like a litany. It is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular metre, and it speaks in a flat, conversational voice, as if listing grievances over a kitchen table. Repetition does the shaping: "Some… Some… Some think," then "These mothers," then a run of "They want." The stanza breaks add timing. The word "Some" dangles alone at the end of the first stanza, and "These mothers" does the same in the third, so each list seems to be taking a breath before the next demand. The short lines keep the tone dry, and the humour stays light until the poem stops being funny.
The imagery works by compressing fairy tales into complaints. "Beauty / in a box brought up from hell" suggests, judging by the image, a gift that is lovely and dangerous at once. The mothers who want you to have "three / eyes, or only the one" push the absurdity further, and the line seems to nod to the folk-tale tradition of odd bodies and goat-tending. Then the tales become plots to be obeyed. Slave for "your ugly sisters." Marry "the prince / instead of the woodcutter / or the princess you love." That last phrase quietly widens the poem's scope. Approval is not only about work and looks, but also about whom you are allowed to love, and "the princess you love" is the one moment where the speaker's own desire slips in. Even the closing instruction in that stanza contradicts itself: "tend the goat / and keep your hands nice." Goat-herding is dirty work, yet the hands must stay clean.
The last stanza changes the temperature. "They never, ever, approve" has the weary doubled adverb of a long-running argument, and the example, "your clothes," is petty enough to be funny. Then the grammar hardens into conditions: "To wear their crowns / you must cut off your hair. / To fit in their shoes, / you must cut off / your heels and toes." The two sentences are parallel, almost chanted, but the violence is plain and the vocabulary is blunt. The line break after "you must cut off" makes us wait for the body part, which lands as "your heels and toes." This recalls the Grimm version of Cinderella, in which the stepsisters mutilate their feet to fit the slipper. Pratt turns that single grisly episode into a general rule for pleasing others.
The title adds a pun. "To fit in" means to belong socially, and "fit in their shoes" means literally to squeeze into them. The phrase may also suggest being forced to become the mothers themselves. The poem leaves that open, which is part of its force.
The poem matters because it takes a comfortable, familiar set of stories and shows the damage hidden inside them. It also refuses an easy villain. These are not one wicked stepmother but many "mothers," each wanting something different, which suggests a pattern of expectation handed down rather than one person's cruelty. Its comic surface lets the reader nod along, so the final image arrives with extra sting. Crowns and shoes promise status and belonging, but the price the poem names is hair, heels and toes. Pleasing everyone, it implies, means ending up smaller than you started.