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“Lawful Heart, Did Anyone Ever See Such Freckles?”

No matter what you look like, the key is to be happy with yourself.

ADELE

IN THOSE FIRST MONTHS BACK IN GRAND RAPIDS, I loved to simply watch my daughter as I rocked and sang to her. Her honeyed skin and shiny hair the color of a bird’s wing took my breath away. She has the world’s prettiest nose (and as a person with established nose issues, I pay attention to noses). It’s like God was extra-inspired when He sculpted her nose.

The first time someone said something about my nose, I was about ten years old. I was having a special lunch with my best friend, Lori, at the home of our gentle, cherished teacher, Mrs. Bryskchuk (in Winnipeg, remember, every third person has a name as Ukrainian as cabbage rolls). Both Lori and I puffed up like Anne’s sleeves that we, out of all our classmates, had been chosen to have lunch with our sweet teacher.

I don’t remember why talk turned to noses as we sat eating egg salad sandwiches in Mrs. Bryskchuk’s kitchen.

“Your nose is cute and pudgy,” Mrs. Bryskchuk said to me mildly, smearing mayo on her sandwich.

That’s what she said. What I heard was that my nose was ugly, fat, too big, too prominent, too much of everything.

I laid down my sandwich, deflated, and fought the tears prickling my eyes. I did not react as Anne did, with rage and indignation. I just got really quiet and pink in the face. My beloved teacher had just confirmed my worst fears about my nose, my face, and my looks. They were not enough, in combination, to be beautiful. My nose ruined my face. My face was not enough. I was not enough.

Those old nettles that sting and smart and hurt more than they “should” (an abominable word) have a way of enduring. My friend Celine was insulted one day on the bus and admits to never really recovering. “I still wear glasses at nearly fifty years of age because of a day in high school on the bus,” she said. “I was excitedly wearing my new contacts, and Alan P. said I looked like a horse.”

(A horse? Alan P.: Have some couth. And also? You’re a horse, too, and a chucklehead.)

Mrs. Bryskchuk had meant no harm. How could she have known that my nose, like Anne’s red hair, was my raw nerve?

Speaking of old nettles, Mrs. Rachel Lynde comes to mind. She came on like a blunt force instrument on any topic of discussion but was especially forthright about Anne’s appearance. Why, the first time they met, Mrs. Rachel found Anne’s raw nerve immediately.

“Well, they didn’t pick you for your looks, that’s sure and certain,”[76] she said, by way of saying “hello.”

Mrs. Rachel continued her laundry list of Anne’s shortcomings:

Scrawny.

Ugly.

Blitzed and bombarded with freckles. Lawful heart!

But it was the last slur that shoved Anne right off the edge: Her hair, the Old Nettle opined, was the exact same tinge as a certain root vegetable that shall not be named. Mrs. Rachel named it anyway.[77] (Here, Gilbert Blythe might have taken notes.)

At this point in the book, if it wasn’t bad enough that Anne was still an orphan on trial for a permanent home, wearing a short, tight, scratchy dress that accentuated her spindly legs, now the town pot stirrer was heaping abuse upon her gingery head.

Sensitivity about one’s looks is a theme in Anne of Green Gables, one that has surprisingly savvy applications for our beauty-obsessed society. Today we might call it a conversation about body image, airbrushing, real women, etc. The truth is, we all have our sore spots, and we can lean in and seek truth from Anne and how she handled her own beauty issues.

What happens next in the story, after Mrs. Rachel bludgeoned Anne, is a boon to the heart of anyone who has ever been called scrawny, fat, homely, mousy, freckled, pale, flat-chested, chinless, chin-full, frizzy-haired, flat-haired, mustachioed, bat-winged, or pigeon-toed. (Anne would give me proxy to dedicate what happens next to anyone who has ever been called anything unkind.)

Anne pushed back. She had an atomic reaction, the likes of which Mrs. Rachel had never before seen. Anne sprang into Mrs. Rachel’s face, quivering, trembling, and raspberry-red with rage. “Passionate indignation”[78] blew out from Anne like gasses and vapors.

Anne used the word hate four times; Maud used the word stamping in equal measure to describe Anne’s feet.

Our girl lobbed a few grenades of her own, notifying Mrs. Rachel that she, too, was ugly, adding, in so many words, that she was also as big as a silo and about that interesting.

Stamping, stomping, bursting, and slamming, Anne was finally carried away on a funnel cloud of wrath, leaving Mrs. Rachel and Marilla with mouths ajar.

“Well, I don’t envy you your job bringing that up, Marilla,”[79] declared Mrs. Rachel, not even able to refer to Anne as a human being.

Of course, Mrs. Rachel might have considered her own lack of humanity here. I mean, really! She met a vulnerable child whose upbringing at that point would have been unsuitable for a mangy dog and then wounded that child further? That is not okay—for the Victorian era or our own.

No wonder Anne had a conniption.

I know, I know. Anne was eleven and out of line. Had I been Anne’s mother, I would have talked to her about appropriate anger management and honoring our elders. But this talk would have come long after the drying of tears, many cuddles, and at least one trip to the neighborhood ice cream place for blue moon ice cream in a violent shade of turquoise that does not occur in nature.

I’ve heard that it takes thirteen positive, uplifting things said about you to remove the bite of just one injuring word. (I have no idea if this is true, but whenever I’ve made my kids produce thirteen compliments for their maligned sibling, it works wonders.)

So if Anne were my girl and she was called scrawny and ugly, and if her hair color was blighted by a battle-ax, the situation’s repair would call for thirty-nine sweet praises. I would tell her that Mrs. Rachel’s bruising words indicate something black and blue inside of Mrs. Rachel, otherwise she never would have said such hurtful things.

(I would go a little teeny bit Mama Grizzly on Mrs. Rachel Lynde, too. I’m not talking about a mauling, per se, but maybe a few roars and an air swat of the paw. You hurt my young, you deal with me.)

So far I’ve been lucky. No one has said mean things to Phoebe about her face—to her face, or mine. I mean, she’s beautiful. Just look at her! Okay, I’m biased. So sue me.

But: There is a certain kind of prettiness prized in our American culture, and Phoebe doesn’t have it. Her hair is too black, and her eyes are too sloped. We don’t live in Korea, but we do live in Dutch/Polish Grand Rapids, where you can’t throw a stone without hitting a blonde, blue-eyed somebody.

Moms worry, am I right? I worry that someday Phoebe will feel like her looks aren’t enough, that she’s not enough. I worry that teenage boys (not the most nuanced demographic) might overlook her foreign loveliness for the familiar and commonplace. I also worry about the opposite, that she will be objectified as an “Asian exotic,” diminished in men’s minds as some kind of submissive geisha. She’s far prettier than I am, yet my girl will have a different and more challenging experience navigating the waters of beauty and identity.

I don’t know what it feels like being an Asian in a white world, but I do know what it’s like to feel like my looks fall far short of the ideal.

We all have tender places, our red hair and pudgy noses and minority colors and marginal facial shapes. No one escapes, not even our friends the supermodels! They often report feeling gawky and gangly during adolescence. (I interviewed a model once, and she told me—bless her gaunt heart—that she sometimes just wished she could eat an apple before a photo shoot. I hung up the phone and ate an apple in her honor.)

Anne’s struggle with feeling unbeautiful is a recurring motif of her story, one of her most relatable points. Her particular quest to accept her red hair—her “lifelong sorrow”[80]—is pitted with obstacles. She dreams of hair “of midnight darkness” and skin with “a clear ivory pallor.”[81] (This sounds like a vampire to me.) She looks into her bosom friend Diana Barry’s face and sees that for which she yearns: “lovely dimples, like little dents in cream.”[82] (What a coincidence. I have little dents in cream . . . on my thighs.)

So let’s go back to our tableau in Avonlea and watch to see not only how Anne dealt with Mrs. Rachel’s insults, but how Marilla, the greenest of mothers, dealt with her red-in-the-face girl.

First, let me say, I would have handled the situation with Mrs. Rachel differently than Marilla did. Most of us would have. She gets some slack for being a surprise recruit mom at this point. Anne’s only been at Green Gables for two weeks. But Marilla was a mother, whether she knew it yet or not. The stoic old maid was finding parenthood’s learning curve to be steep, but she wasn’t as lost as she thought she was. There in the rubble between her oldest friend and this peculiar little girl who just might be allowed to stay in her home, Marilla opened her mouth to say she knew not what.

When Marilla spoke, all moms new and vintage should have listened in. What she said is nothing short of an exposé of her heart. She pushed back, advocating for Anne in a way that surprises us all—and her most of all.

“You shouldn’t have twitted her about her looks, Rachel,”[83] she said flatly, later adding that Mrs. Rachel had been too hard on Anne.

You were wrong, not Anne—the girl I’m becoming so fond of, though I can’t believe it. She was wrong, too, but you hurt her, and that’s not acceptable.

Mrs. Rachel did not take this well. Like all bullies, she was thin-skinned and flooded with pique that she should be found in the wrong.

“Well, I see that I’ll have to be very careful what I say after this, Marilla, since the fine feelings of orphans, brought from goodness knows where, have to be considered before anything else.”[84]

Now you’re catching on, lady.

Though Mrs. Rachel responded defensively, just maybe Marilla’s rebuke hit a teachable spot deep down. Maybe it’s because we know how Anne’s and Mrs. Rachel’s relationship blossomed later on in the story, but something makes me believe that Avonlea’s Queen Bee knew she had crossed a line and regretted it.

Rachel Lynde meant to swipe at orphans in general with her “fine feelings” comment, which reveals again her prejudice. But I thought it was an interesting remark, all the same.

Just because an orphan may not have found her place of belonging doesn’t mean her fine feelings don’t have to be considered. In fact, her feelings may be finer than those who have always belonged.

When I first was reunited with Dora, she laughed when I told her about my nose qualms, not in ridicule but in solidarity.

“I have the same nose, but now I like it. It fits my face.”

It fits my face. Those four words of healing went a long way to reconciling me and my nose. It was one of those moments that seems small but was anything but.

No longer an insecure child at the mercy of a harmless comment, I had long since retired teenage fantasies about nose jobs. Somewhere at the end of high school, I even stopped shading it with brown eye shadow to “contour” it as Seventeen magazine suggested. I was beginning to change my expectations to fit my looks, rather than changing my looks to fit my expectations. I realized—slowly—that a teeny, wee button of a nose on this countenance would look ludicrous, after all. My nose did not ruin my face; it belonged there!

To accept one’s raw nerve is all well and good, but when someone “twits” us about it? That sore spot never quite goes away.

Several years ago, when I was in the midst of writing a memoir with Lynne Spears, Britney Spears’s mother, someone twitted me. Cobbling together child care, dealing with nonstop phone calls and e-mails, and rushing hither and yon as I tried to write this much-hyped tome was taking its toll. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally.

Whereupon I found myself ambushed one day during a quick errand by a man whose filter was even hole-ier than Alan P.’s. He was an acquaintance whom I ran into one day in the parking lot of the bank. I was politely trying to extricate myself from a prolonged conversation when the bomb dropped.

“Has anyone ever asked you if you were Jewish?” he asked me quizzically, as if he was dying to know.

I honestly thought he was going in a completely different direction.

“Oh, you mean because of Jonah’s and Ezra’s names?” I replied, innocent as a lamb. We had chosen Hebrew names from the Bible, and Ezra especially was ahead of the popularity curve.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. He made a loose cupping motion with his hands, one hand up at his head and the other one just below on his face.

“Because of your nose. And your forehead.”

I swear to you, he italicized.

He used quick, billowing motions, extending his hand back and forth from his nose, somewhat like the double “trombone” gesture in charades, made to indicate that one could no longer see things close up.

Blood rushed to what felt like my whole upper body. My knees felt weak, and I placed a hand on the hood of my minivan for support.

“My . . . what?” I couldn’t develop a sentence to save my life.

“Your nose,” he said more deliberately, as if I were a bit slow. He continued with the dramatic gesticulations. “And your forehead.” The trombones played on. It was like a mime performance for one, right there in the parking lot.

As I reeled, the stunning bigotry in his comment wasn’t uppermost on my mind, but even then I realized he had crossed all kinds of lines.

“I . . . Oh, well.” I was paralyzed into vacancy. I wobbled to the car and drove off like a bat from a dark place. Once out of this man’s vision, I erupted into tears.

My emotional response surprised me. What did I care what this person thought about my nose? After all, it wasn’t as if Colin Firth had just insulted my facial features. The filtration system between his brain and his mouth worked like using a laundry basket as a bucket. Pretty much everything just spilled out.

I was thirty-seven years old, a socialized adult who knew that in these cases one must consider the source.

However, I felt as if I’d been slugged in the stomach. How dare he? I patted my embattled cartilage. I still love you, nose, old friend! Well, perhaps “love” is too strong a word. But accept you, yes!

I was suddenly beset with concerns about my forehead. Certainly, it was not a Cindy Crawford number. I’ve worn bangs all my life because I just look more attractive with them. My forehead wasn’t my favorite feature, but I hadn’t been aware up until then that it merited dramatically mushrooming hand gestures.

Thankfully, by the time I got home, I had reined myself in. My forehead was just fine, thank you, and if not, my bangs covered it anyway! And my nose? By jingle—it still went with my face, no matter what this crass cat had said.

Soon enough, my outrage shifted, from my stinging ego to the astounding anti-Semitism in his words. I thought of my beautiful Jewish friends and their beautiful noses, and I feared for humanity anew.

Back in Avonlea, Marilla was plunged into motherhood’s deep end, confronted with a fine kettle of fish and Anne’s heartbreak. It’s a masterstroke of Maud’s writing to have empathy-challenged Marilla recall a long-ago hurt: “What a pity she is such a dark, homely little thing,”[85] Marilla had overheard one aunt of hers say to another when she was a child.

In that moment, Marilla softened, as we all should when empathy clarifies our understanding and relaxes our stubborn hearts. Empathy reminded Marilla that she knew what it was to be stung as is by a wasp with careless words. She understood as Anne could not that waspish words could loiter for years and shape one’s sense of worth and beauty.

Marilla’s maternal instincts awakened. She understood, too, that we develop sturdier hides when we grow older, but that aging itself brings a new set of concerns, far from the consciousness of The Young and the Pore-less.

I recall the time a relative told me cheerfully I had put on some weight, in skewered, congratulatory tones.

“Living the good life, I see,” she laughed heartily. I did not shove her face into the potato salad.

Or there was the time when someone whose opinion mattered much to me crooned sweetly, “What chubby cheeks you have, my dear.” I felt like Hansel, about to be stuffed into the wicked witch’s oven. This same person took to calling me “Dumpling” for a time, until I insisted to her great surprise that she stop it and find a less shaming nickname for me. “Like ‘Cheese Straw,’” I suggested. It didn’t stick.

Don’t get me started on cellulite.

Or wrinkles.

Or stinking liver spots, for the love of all! It’s a dark day dawning when one notices a brown blotch the shape of Madagascar on one’s face, and it’s bigger than any freckle has the decency to be.

My chin has fallen, and it can’t get up. Other parts have tumbled as well.

I may or may not have this aberrant eyebrow thing that sticks out of my face like a small antenna. Thankfully, it’s noticeable only in a certain light. Yes, aging brings with it plenty of opportunities to be sensitive, but luckily, by and by, we get over ourselves more quickly than when we were young and frolicsome and merely freckled.

Once when she was bubbling over with happiness, Anne told Marilla, “Just at present I have a soul above red hair.”[86] Good thing I usually have a soul above my nose (and forehead, cheeks, and thighs).

By the time we hit a certain age, we can also hope that most people are going to be a little kinder and gentler overall. I hope that about myself most of all.

In this world we will always have with us (and in us) the poor in diplomacy. We will always have people like sweet Mrs. Bryskchuk who don’t even know how much their words cost us. We will always have with us the Alan Ps and the Mrs. Rachels, who step on our private land mines and trip our hidden wires. The question is, what are we going to do about it? How are we going to handle our beauty issues, and those of our daughters?

On the short road between Green Gables and Mrs. Rachel’s, we as readers learn more from Anne on how to cope when someone vexes our vain spots. I watch with glee as Anne walked down the road, buzzing with an idea that would elevate her coming apology from an act of contrition to a piece of theater.

She had already stated her preference for life in a dungeon that crawled with snakes over making an apology to Mrs. Rachel, but her stubbornness had been unexpectedly swayed by love. Against punitive measures she would not budge, but the tenderness of a father figure could move mountains.

Dear Matthew, already smitten, put in his oar, despite his promises to the contrary, and suggested Anne smooth things over with Mrs. Rachel. When Anne believed she was apologizing for Matthew’s sake, everything changed. Their relationship was already beginning to transform her.

Once at the Lynde house, the curtain opens: Anne flung herself body and soul at the very mercy seat of Mrs. Rachel.

She inserted a tremor into her voice.

She laid it on, thick and sweet as molasses, listing all the ways in which she had transgressed Mrs. Rachel and throwing in a few more for good measure. I suspect she had even convinced herself that she should apologize.

She begged for forgiveness.

And then, just when Mrs. Rachel was squirming like a bug under glass, Anne played the orphan card: “If you refuse it will be a lifelong sorrow to me. You wouldn’t like to inflict a lifelong sorrow on a poor little orphan girl, would you, even if she had a dreadful temper? Oh, I am sure you wouldn’t.”[87]

I am also sure she wouldn’t. And she didn’t.

Talk about heaping hot coals on someone’s head. I bet you Mrs. Rachel’s ears had smoke curling out of them for days.

The two foes became friends before the sun set on the Lake of Shining Waters that day. Anne had won her over.

In Scripture, the apostle Paul talks about winning people over—the neighbor, the husband who doesn’t believe, the weak, the lawless. When we are insulted and defensive, how can we turn things upside down as Anne did? How can we, swayed by love, win our foes over?

Mrs. Rachel acted abominably, but Anne also behaved badly. Yet in this messy situation, grace, love, and creative apology were the victors. See how everyone was changed by the encounter? Marilla sipped her first taste of that shielding, fierce fury, the kind only mothers have, and advocated for her child. Matthew, swayed by love, took a risk for Anne.

Anne was not quite changed enough to avoid dying her hair green a few months later, but in this particular episode she came out ahead. She pushed back, and that was the right thing to do. She stood up for her humanity, and after a time of—let’s call it reflection—she used humor and theater to win over Mrs. Rachel.

I wish I would have had Anne’s vigor that day in the parking lot, the wherewithal to stand up to Laundry Basket Face and tell him it was not okay to say those things to me, or to the Jewish race. Because it’s beautiful to stand up to bullies and oppressors.

I want to teach my daughter how to act when someone trips her wires and that it’s okay to be angry but not to sin. I want to teach her the difference as I continue to understand it.

I hope she discovers the beauty in her otherness, in amber skin, inky hair, and eyes the shape of watermelon seeds. May she also look for and praise beauty in others, and develop irresistible inner loveliness that draws and warms people.