I gotta clean my teeth and get some sleep

Which are WAY more in character for a modern foster kid who’d be able to rip her own jeans if she really wanted, but might not have much experience with costlier brands or being able to spend money changing her room in a permanent way that landlords might not allow.

I’ve thought about this a lot and you do have to change some of the really basic dynamics a little. Orphans like Anne in late 19th century Canada were basically indentured labourers; you have to change it up.

Also, I’m reaching deep into my children’s lit study of AOGG. You see, the underlying dynamic of AOGG is that Matthew, Marilla, and Avonlea think they know what virtue, morality, and Christianity are all about. They have very specific ways of doing things and very established notions of what a good, respectable person looks like.

Anne is, on the surface, not at all a good or respectable person. She’s a hoyden. But she does value virtue. At the beginning she tells Matthew she’s considering whether she should want to be “divinely beautiful or dazzlingly clever or angelically good “

But by the end of the book, she proves that she is already inherently all three–her beauty is compared to a woodland deity; she’s the top of her class; and she has a spirit of love and kindness that so radically breaks Avonlea conceptions that she also turns the people around her into better, kinder people as well.

Matthew and Marilla would sign up to be foster parents because their church is encouraging people to foster children in care and sponsor refugee families and things like that. They’re kind of staid white liberals in middle age who want to do the right thing, like making sandwiches for the homeless on Thursdays in the church basement. But they care more about appearing correct than breaking out of their shells.

And they were expecting a child. Their concept of fostering and adoption is still kind of old; they were both adopted as infants by their parents, so they think a foster child coming to your home is going to be, if not in a crib, still at the blocks and Sesame Street age. They bought a little bed. Maybe they’d already fostered a little kid or two.

But then their caseworker calls them up and tells them about Anne, and whomp, they’ve got a trans preadolescent.

And Anne has a ton of psychiatric diagnoses and a regiment of meds, and you could see her as a walking behavioural disaster even after she’s taken her Ritalin, but she’s also so friendly and so kind, and she’s the one making fast friends with the eldest girl of the Syrian family the church has sponsored into the neighbourhood, she’s talking to and getting to know the homeless, she’s trying to save the whales and navigate the complicated ethics of the seal hunt and sometimes she lies awake at night crying about wild bee populations and gay men in Chechnya.

So Matthew and Marilla have to slowly come around to thinking: We can try to squash all the abnormal out of this girl and make her as “functional” as possible, or we can accept that she’s going to be a wild anarchic SJW goblin, and help her be the best one she can. Which also spills over into academics: They have to push the local school to accommodate the way she learns, because when she’s accommodated she’s so smart, but stuck without supports in an ordinary classroom, she’s a living nightmare and getting suspended all the time.

I’m a mental health therapist and I’ve worked as a caregiver in foster homes. I’m literally basing this Anne on my friends, people I know, the kids I’ve cared for in foster homes, and kids I’ve worked with as a therapist.

(”How dare you put Anne Shirley on Ritalin!” I’m not saying I think she ought to be, though I’m not saying she shouldn’t be either, but in 21st century Canada, in the foster system? She’d be on Ritalin.)

Stressful early childhood experiences, like lack of a stable parental figure, leaves kids hugely at risk of mental illnesses and learning disabilities. Dealing with transphobia all the time also puts someone at serious risk of mental illness and trauma. It’s not a clown car, it’s a spiral of risk factors that need to be dealt with through loving, stable care and creative problemsolving.

SCHITT’S CREEK CELEBRATION

“‘I feel ill,’ he announced. ‘I’m going to bed, where I may die.’”

“It seems as if those of high ability cannot resist some extra, dangerous stroke of cleverness, which results in a fatal flaw and begins a slow decline to evil.”

”’Is that all you can do in the face of tragedy?’ Howl asked. ‘Make toast!’”

”’Dear Sophie,’ he said. ‘Always busy. You were hard at work yesterday, weren’t you, in spite of my advice? Why have you made a jigsaw puzzle of my best suit? Just a friendly inquiry, you know.’”

”Howl‘s voice was presently heard shouting weakly, ‘Help me, someone! I’m dying from neglect up here!’”

”’Dear Sophie, do please tell me how you bully a fire demon into being that obliging. I’d dearly love to know!’”

”’Look. Survey. Inspect. My hair is ruined! I look like a pan of bacon and eggs!’”

“‘Aunts are terrible. They go for you with hat pins.’”

“‘Yes, let’s admit it,” she told the skull. ‘I snoop.’”

“‘You must admit I have a right to live in a pigsty if I want.’”