Tadpole's Promise

Where the willow tree meets the water, a tadpole met a caterpillar.He is her shiny black pearl and she is his beautiful rainbow.They gazed into each other's tiny eyes...and fell in love.
"I love everything about you," said the caterpillar. Being a tad bit too bossy, caterpillar insists her shiny black pearl should always remain the way he is.
"Promise you'll never change." And foolishly the tadpole promised...
But we all know that tadpoles don't stay the same, and neither do caterpillars.
Will they still be able to love each other?

Well, I was extremely disturbed at the end of the book and couldn't help wondering how this book was considered a childrens' collection. I was so shocked. Basically, the caterpillar gets disappointed time and time again with the tadpole as he doesn't seem to keep to his promise by remaining her shiny black pearl. He loses his tail and grows limbs and so on and she feels betrayed. She can't understand why he breaks his promise to her when she faithfully remained as his pretty beautiful rainbow and she cries herself into a deep sleep, all the while dreaming of her love. One day, as she wakes up, she is so caught up in thoughts about her black pearl that she graciously decides to give him one last chance because she truly loved him. However she is so caught up with wanting to see her love that she doesn't realise she has changed into a very pretty butterfly. She flies off to the place where the willow tree meets the water, but instead of a shiny black pearl, she sees a big frog on a lily pad. Determined to find her lover, she askes ever so politely, "Excuse me, but have you seen my shiny, blac..."

But mid-sentence------ GULP!

The frog very quicly grabs her in his mouth with his tongue and swallows her and then lets out a sigh wondering where his long lost love, his beautiful rainbow could be....

As disturbing as it is, it is driving something home as well.. How we sometimes make irrational demands on each other. How we expect that someone to be who we want them to be. How we want that someone to fit into our image of them. How we get unhappy when things don't go our way.. And also how when we finally wholeheartedly open up to someone and prepare to be with them, we get 'eaten' along the way.. When the other party never really gets to see how much we wanted this to work and how eagerly we were ready to make it... It just never gets known and the story ends there....