“All ‘Spirit and Fire and Dew’”: An Introduction

Anne is an amazing character. She represents something really profound for people considering she is an orphaned, undervalued, displaced soul, who is told she is trash. And Anne’s certainly the wrong gender to have value in the world. However, she turns around a community by absolutely remaining true to her spirit.

MEGAN FOLLOWS, LEAD ACTRESS IN THE ANNE OF GREEN GABLES MINISERIES

“WHAT’S AN ORPHAN?”

The question, posed by my once-parentless kid, left me momentarily speechless. Seven-year-old Phoebe Min-Ju Jayne, she of the raven’s wing hair, golden skin, and human cannonball tendencies, asked for the definition as we were reading a children’s picture-book version of Anne of Green Gables one evening at bedtime.

Since my husband and I retrieved that gorgeous baby—a firecracker even at six months—from Korea, our world had never been the same. P, like Anne, is “all ‘spirit and fire and dew,’”[1] a lightning flash who broke off and then nuked the microwave knob (we use pliers to this day) at age two; ran naked through our church at age four; and somehow reversed Grandpa’s vintage convertible and rolled it down the driveway, barely averting catastrophe, at age five. Wild thing, she makes our hearts sing—sing, or stop cold five times a day.

Because Phoebe had been abandoned by her birth father while still in the womb and then bravely relinquished by her birth mother in Korea, Phoebe was our girl now. Yet I knew her casual question was one of great magnitude. The word orphan is six letters fraught with baggage (and by “baggage,” I mean steamer trunk). The evocations are instant and panoramic, bringing up visions of vulnerable ragamuffins who are hungry, desperate, and alone. In our mind’s eye, we see a grimy urchin on the streets of Mumbai or a spindly, underdeveloped child, rattling his crib bars in an Eastern European orphanage. Orphans from literature and movies flit across our consciousness. Annie (“Leapin’ lizards!”), Harry Potter, Elsa from Frozen, Pip from Great Expectations, Tarzan, Luke Skywalker—and on and on the orphan archetype goes, all bound up in a great big Oliver Twist–tie. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Robin, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and Green Arrow: all orphaned!

Yet this word trips wires like almost no other. Adoptive mothers are especially sensitive to it. I once read an emotional blog by a mom in the process of adopting kids from Haiti. She just loathed that her I-600 immigration paperwork was stamped with the words “Petition to Classify Orphan as an Immediate Relative.”

“The fact that the word orphan will describe you for a portion of your life breaks my heart,” she wrote. “It seems to signify that you’re lost, unclaimed and not cared for.” Her heart was yelling like a crazed fan at a hockey game: “I found you! I claim you! I will care for you!” A friend of mine, an adoptive mom, visibly bristled at the word when I brought it up; her eyes grew cold, and her arms folded around herself. Our conversation grounded to a screeching halt. After another friend lost both of her parents in a short span, she prickled when a coworker commented that she was “an orphan now.”

Many adoption agencies shy away from or even ban the use of the word in their processes with adopting parents because it’s not “positive adoption language.” Nobody wants the big fat “orphan” label tattooed to their foreheads or those of their children. Nobody wants to lug around that steamer trunk, for themselves or their kids.

But, if I may reference Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, I do not think orphan means what we think it means.[2] Yes, the common usage is the loss of parents, or at the very least, the abandonment by unfit, living parents. (Interestingly, in the Bible, the word occurs forty-two times, and it always refers to someone without a father; yet in terms of the animal world, orphans are almost always deserted by their mothers.) The word is so much broader and more expansive than we give it credit for. One thesaurus’ listing of words related to orphan[3] popped out at me in neon:

Orphan: Bereft, left behind, and left.

Bereft.

Left behind.

Left.

By that definition, we’ve all been orphans at one time or another. We’ve all been brought to our knees by the loss of someone we love, somebody whose death bereaves us terribly. We’ve all been left behind, renounced, ditched, and forsaken. Fired. Dumped. Snubbed. And who among us has not been just plain left, plopped down on the curb of life, waiting for the ride that will never come?

This definition of orphan shifted my thinking on the word. It downgraded my response from Big Scary Word to something demystified, broader, relatable. I began to see orphans everywhere, spotting the bereft in the grieving daughter, the left behind in a teenage boy who doesn’t make the baseball team, and the left in a divorced friend’s eyes.

And with the scaling down of it came a new comfort level and the surprising thought that it’s actually positive to talk about the O word. Because in a world of Elsas and Annas, Harry Potters and Miss Peregrine’s peculiar children, Batmen and Catwomen, it’s going to come up, over and over and over. Adoptees especially are going to wonder on some level where they fit into our culture’s constant orphan storytelling. No wonder, then, that orphan has become an important word for me and my house. Not only was that girl of my heart asking about it; it’s a question I’ve been asking, in one form or another, for most of my life. After all, I was adopted too.

So when Phoebe asked about the definition of orphan, I tried to put the definition in plain terms and tell her in a way that she could understand—that there are many paths to orphanhood. Anne Shirley was orphaned when her loving, schoolteacher parents, Walter and Bertha, both succumbed to typhoid by the time she was three months old. “And Mommy was an orphan before Oma and Opa adopted her,” I explained. “My birth mother couldn’t take care of a baby then, just like your birth mom couldn’t take care of a baby, any baby, when you came. You were a kind of orphan, too, like me and like Anne, before we came to Korea and brought you home.”

“Like Anne . . .” Huh.

That conversation with my daughter lit something in me. We were, all three of us—me, Phoebe Min-Ju Jayne, and Anne—card-carrying castaways who had traveled a winding path to belonging. I’ve always wanted to tell the quirky, poignant, and oddly paralleled stories of my daughter’s and my adoptions. In that moment, cuddled up together on P’s bed, I knew I wanted to tell those stories plus one more in a book, braiding each chapter with a devilishly red-haired ribbon.

“Anne of Green Gables,” My Daughter, and Me is the result. As I wrote, I wove in one smaller strand, the story of Anne’s creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery, who invested her life’s work in writing stories about children who felt as lost and alone as she did. “Maud,” the child of a mother who died when she was a baby and a mostly absentee father, seemed to be on a quest to find belonging for herself and her characters. As I’ve read thousands upon thousands of her words, Maud has become a writing godmother to me. I deeply admire her fat, buttery words, her pitch-perfect references to the Bible and classic literature, and her ability to make me laugh and cry. She was a gifted humor writer who had the rare gift of handling both comedy and drama well. Yet she experienced the pummeling rejection known to every writer; Anne of Green Gables was rejected several times before being published.[4]

Part memoir and part Anne super-fan book, this book will interlace Anne’s and Maud’s stories with our yarns, taking you from the red-dirt beaches of Prince Edward Island to the ginseng fields of Korea. Along the way, you may uncover truths about your own search for identity, finding yourself in places you hadn’t thought to look.

As you enter Anne’s world through quotations from and retellings of a few of her stories, you’ll fall under her spell, energized by her heart’s vigor and an unsinkable spirit that couldn’t be submerged even after she had been sorely bereaved, left alone, and just plain left. So full of hope and good humor, she reminds us we can all live our lives as she did—resilient, redemptive, and openhearted. She inspires “orphans” of every kind to find a home that feels right and that may or may not be with our biological relatives.

Since the 1908 release of Maud’s first novel, Anne Girl endures—beloved, cherished, and admired, not because Anne is perfect, but rather because she’s far from it. We see ourselves in the girl who hopefully uttered the words “tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet,”[5] wishing for a new day and a clean slate to begin again, or maybe just to break over Gilbert Blythe’s cute head. She represents the unwanted stray that exists in all of us from time to time. She makes us believe in ourselves, though we’ve all been “left” in some essential way. She compels us to keep moving forward, even when it’s hard.

Meeting Anne

Most kids lucky enough to grow up with books discover a character who inspires them. Being from the prairies, I thrilled to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her homesteading adventures. And I cheered for that ambitious Little Woman, Josephine March, a prefeminist who wrote her way out of any hole. But I had only one real kindred spirit, a lifelong literary companion. No one could light a candle to the carrot-headed magpie who found her way home to the reluctant care of a lonely, aging brother and sister who discovered they needed her far more than she needed them.

I met Anne around the time I was myself in “the depths of despair,”[6] having fallen victim to an eighth-grade she-bully who blacklisted me for most of the year. I didn’t know it would all blow over, as these things usually do, and that by year’s end I would find my own Diana Barry, a bosom friend who understood me just as I was. All I knew was that I was so lonely and that school was nearly unbearable. Anne’s melodramatic speeches (“My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes”[7]) gave voice to my pain; her deep sensitivity to rejection and insult reflected my own. I clung to my literary friend, distracted by her hilarious capers and inspired to find hope and beauty in the cruel ugliness of eighth grade. After all, Anne was able to put that insufferable Josie Pye in her place; maybe I could do the same with Viola Goossen.

Anne was my one true friend during those days and in the days to come. She was me, except that she dreamed of nut-brown hair, and my hair was the exact color of some nut, somewhere, before I started smearing it in various shades of “mochachino.” She dreamed of puffed sleeves, and I dreamed of buffed arms. She bemoaned her hair; I bemoaned my thighs. Minor details. Really, I’m a lot like Anne:

Three cheers for Anne with an “e”! She is a girl who, give or take hair the color of orange soda and exceptional academic strengths, is my fictional twin. A girl who understands, more than dear Laura Ingalls and Jo March, what it is to be an orphan like me and, later, like my own fiery little girl. Even at my somewhat mature age, I still channel that plucky, dreamy girl who has endless “scope for the imagination.”[8] Anne’s impassioned spirit emboldens mine, and her sensitivity and boundless imagination mirror my own softhearted dreaminess.

I’m betting you feel the same way about Anne with an “e,” that she’s your kindred spirit too. She means so much to so many people. Come along for the ride as my girl and I step into the world of our favorite book—of reveling in ipecac-soaked drama, sampling liniment-flavored cake, and getting your best friend inadvertently spiffed on raspberry cordial.

Join Anne, me, and Phoebe Min-Ju Jayne as our stories plait together—one strand red, one raven black, and one mochachino. Link arms with us as we find our way to places of belonging, our forever homes. Settle in with us in this world of “spirit and fire and dew.” Here’s a story for the orphan in us all.