Orphans.

It’s a hard knock life.

[I called my mom this afternoon after a difficult couple of days. This is something I recommend doing, so long as you have a great mom like I do. Talking to her re-energized me to finish this blog post, which I started recently but didn’t get around to finishing.]

I have always been critical of the way in which we glorify the alleged achievement of “bringing a person into the world.” On the one hand, creating another being seems like an enormous feat. On the other hand, every single living organism on the planet is capable of reproduction. I guess more specifically, I am critical of the obligations we supposedly have to those who created us simply because they put us on this earth. I owe it to my mom because once I was here, she made sure I was fed and clothed and did my homework on time. But the sheer act of putting me here? I mean, thanks a lot, but have you taken a look around lately? Along with everyone else in the Midwest, I’m currently trapped inside my own residence because if I step outside for too long without the proper winter wear, my extremities will turn blue and have to be amputated, and let’s face it, I would probably die before surgery anyway because the roads are too nasty for an ambulance to reach me and the lock on our apartment door gets stuck sometimes so the emergency crews would probably be dealing with that for a few minutes, while I lay in bed just waiting for that white light to appear. And all of this is probably tied to fracking somehow because of those bastards at the energy companies. And we’re supposed to be grateful for being put on Earth? (I’m mostly joking. Earth is cool. I mean, it’s probably better than Saturn or whichever planet is perpetually frozen.)

The situation is a little different, of course, if you have adopted a child. In that case, I’m pretty sure your child is forever indebted to you — congrats on the five star nursing home you’ll be posted up at in 60 years. And besides that, adoption is cool for myriad reasons. I used to be really obsessed with orphans and adoption. Way back in the day when Water Babies were the cool toy, I wanted a black baby. This was way before Angelina Jolie started plucking kids out of all the developing nations of the world, so I was seriously cool. And I threw a mini bitch fit when my grandma gave me the white baby for Christmas. How do I put this politely…? My grandma has “more traditional” (ahem, racist) life preferences, so looking back, I know that it probably concerned her deeply that I was already considering a multiracial family, whether it meant my Water Baby was the product of a romantic relationship with an NBA player or adopted from Namibia. Let us remark at the beauty of children who embrace diversity!

My orphan obsession didn’t stop with my Water Baby adoption. I loved “Madeline” and the movie “A Little Princess.” And when I was in first grade, I wrote and directed my first movie. The movie was called “The Group of Girls” and was about 15 girls who lived in an abandoned house wearing t-shirts puffy-painted with their first names on them and solving the problems of the neighborhood, most notably by meddling in the crumbling marriage of the next-door neighbors. I spent days typing up the script on an old Macintosh computer in our basement and cast the movie with friends from elementary school. Critics called it “pretty good for a first project.” There is only one copy of the film and it is on VHS in storage somewhere.

But the biggest chunk of my orphan phase was occupied by my deep commitment to the musical, “Annie.”

Sometime around 3rd or 4th grade, I watched a particular episode of the short-lived ABC documentary program “Turning Point” hosted by Barbara Walters. It was called “Turning Point: The Search for Broadway’s New Annie.” Turning point, indeed! The viewing of this program — which showed the process of auditioning, choosing, and rehearsing the 1997 cast of the musical — launched a multi-year quest to act in the musical. And the follow-up episode about the firing of Joanna Pacitti totally rocked my world. “How could that little Brittny Kissinger do that to Joanna?” I wondered, remembering an important fact my mother had taught me: “Spelling ‘Brittany’ any way other than ‘B-r-i-t-t-a-n-y’ is just trashy.” Joanna deserved to be Annie because she had the hair and sang beautifully in her parents’ barber shop! And now she didn’t “get to be Annie no more,” and it was so sad. I felt that Joanna and I at least had something in common, because I never got to be Annie, probably because I froze up during auditions but also because Annie was not five feet tall.

But why orphans? As an adult, I can now recognize that “Annie” and “Madeline” and “Eloise” (who ran around The Plaza Hotel with her dog and turtle while her mother gallivanted around the world) are far cries from the reality of being an orphan (I assume) and this romanticized representation probably had something to do with it. Here were all these girls living on their own, having a blast and constantly singing songs (the best!). There was so much friendship, so much camaraderie around mutual suffering. And growing up with parents and a sibling and a house, the thought of living in an attic with another 10-year-old and eating magic pastries sent by the mysterious Indian man across the street seemed terribly exciting. Sleepovers are fun — so what if we have to wash a few floors every day?

Something occurred to me recently, and that is that Glamorized Orphandom is probably nothing like being an actual orphan. But it is like being 24. We live in dirty houses and we are all suffering in some way — suffering from empty bank accounts or difficult relationships or just hangovers. A few weekends ago, I went out with my friends until four in the morning and then had a snowball fight with people we met at the bar. And then we woke up the next morning and watched “The Birdcage” and got hamburgers. I imagine if there were a storybook following Madeline and the other girls of Miss Clavel’s in their early twenties, they would be having similar adventures.

The things I thought were great about Glamorized Orphandom (and for accuracy’s sake, Madeline was not an orphan in the original books, but is depicted as such in the films) are pretty fun. Oftentimes, I am surrounded by fellow humans who, as described by the great T. Alison Swift, are “happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time.” There are snowball fights in the middle of the night. I don’t have to make my bed if I don’t want to (FYI Mom, I usually do). But then there’s the hard part. Sometimes I just don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes my radiator sprays hot water on me in the middle of the night and I wish someone would take care of it so I didn’t have to call the landlord, because I’m scared of calling the landlord. Sometimes I go to fill my dog’s water bowl early in the morning and I’m clumsy and I spill water all over the kitchen floor and I just want someone to hand me a paper towel and reassure me that I’m not an idiot. So I’m lucky, because I’m not an orphan, glamorous or otherwise. My mom didn’t get amnesia in World War I and inadvertently condemn me to a harsh, early 20th century life of servitude and I didn’t get dropped off at Miss Hannigan’s during The Great Depression. We have our disagreements, but she is always at the other end of the phone. Unless she has book club or something, but then we’ll just talk later, although…okay, I have to go to the grocery store…yeah…so maybe like after 5? Oh 5 your time. Okay. Well we’ll figure it out.