editorial notes: Our Lady's Child

I’m a little apprehensive of this one, tbh. Like, am I gonna be able to snark it? I’m assuming this isn’t like religious head-canon, but will it still feel weird to make fun of it? We’ll see. 

Play along: Here’s the OG story in English. Add any notes you have in the comments below! 

• This merry (hi) tale begins with a vignette of a woodcutter, his wife, and their dwelling. They have one child and OH MY GOODNESS they can’t feed her. Oh my goodness. They’re strapped for cash, and they don’t know how to feed their child. Rebecca IRL note: I just spent two days babysitting a gorgeous baby girl and had trouble feeding her for like a minute and OH MY GoOoOOOODness that was stress on wheels, so, I feel maybe a second’s worth of this darling family’s plight. Hopefully Our Lady comes in to make things better??? :( :( :(
• Anyway, if that bullet didn’t make it clear, I’m all in from the opening sentence. IS THIS FAM GONNA MAKE IT? 10/10 stakes, Grimm bros
• One morning, the woodcutter got up—sorrowfully—and went to work. As he was going about his biz, a beautiful woman with a crown of shining stars stood before him. She identified herself as the Virgin Mary, and told the woodcutter to bring her his child. She’d care for her. 
• I’m feeling conflicted in snarking this, because, on one hand, I’m a Catholic kid. I’m a Mama Mary’s girl. My stress rate is plummeting because I know Mary’s gonna make it okay. ON THE OTHER HAND, I read a lot of thrillers and oh boy, like, maybe don’t give your kid to the random woman in the forest, no matter how many stars she’s got on her head. THIS IS A JOURNEY. 
• The woodcutter was desperate or perhaps a religious man or possibly both, so he gave his kid to Mary. 
• Mary took the kid up to heaven with her. DID THE GIRL DIE? Or is this the myth of the second Assumption? (Genuinely curious) 
• Heaven sounds great, guys. “There the child fared well, ate sugar-cakes, and drank sweet milk, and her clothes were of gold, and the little angels played with her.” Her poor parents.
• Title card: FOURTEEN YEARS LATER. (HER POOR PARENTS!!!!!) (Also, is this just the opposite of Disney’s Hercules story?) 
• In heaven, fourteen years later, Mary called the now-teen girl to her and said that she was going to go on a trip. She gave the teen the keys to the thirteen doors of heaven. “Twelve of these you may open, and behold the glory which is within them, but the thirteenth, to which this little key belongs, is forbidden. Beware of opening it, or you will bring misery on yourself.” OH MY GOODNESS, it’s true. Every story really is Blackbeard. 
• The teenaged girl promised to be good. (Snort.) She explored twelve doors’ worth of Heaven’s glory. Behind each door sits one of the Apostles. Cool. We all know what’s about to happen, right? 
• Self-restraint, that’s what. The teen said to her angelic companions, “I will not quite open it, and I will not go inside it, but I will unlock it so that we can see just a little through the opening.” This, coincidentally, is what I say when I’m opening a new jar of peanut butter.
• The angels remind her that this would be a sin.
• The teen thought about this. She really wanted to open that door. 
• The angels left her alone with the door, which was a really smart idea. Once alone, the girl had an equally brilliant thought: Since no one was around, no one would know if she had opened the door, right? So weird, my dog thinks something similar with pizza I leave on the counter and I gotta tell you, girl, everyone always knows. Plus, you’re in heaven. Omniscience. Google it. 
• Behind the thirteenth door was THE HOLY TRINITY blazing in omnipotence and fire and glory. So much for anyone not knowing. Anyway, she looked at God in His three-person glory for a bit, then reached out to touch a little bit of the light emanating from Him, and, whoa there, her finger turned to gold. (This is Blackbeard! But, like, the Sunday school edit?) 
• She went and tried to wash the gold off her finger because obvi she didn’t want Mary to know that she’d seen the Trinity. But, like, obvi, when Mary came home from her trip, she knew exactly what had happened. 
• The girl lied and tried to get out of it anyway. Mary gave the girl a chance to ‘fess up. The girl lied again. 
• And another time, even though Mary’s literally staring at the girl’s golden finger. 
• And, with a sorrowful glance, Mary tells the girl she can’t be in Heaven anymore. So the girl falls asleep. When she wakes up, she’s in a wild wood. She tries to scream, but she can’t. She tries to move, but there are thorns on her every side, pinning her in. She could only creep her way to a hollowed old tree that she could curl up inside, and she was uncomfortable and sad and hello, plot twist. One of many, I assume. 
• She’s crying because she’s remembering the sugar cakes and golden clothing she used to have unfettered access to…and we cut to a montage of her digging for roots and berries and the seasons flipping forward “year after year”. So she’s at least twenty now, right? 
• When we next see the girl, it’s springtime. The King of the country we’re in…oh boy. Okay, so we’re gonna have a romance now. Prepare yourselves. 
• Anyhoo, the King of the country was in this random thorny wood, hunting. He followed a deer, cut through some brambles, and OH MY GOODNESS there’s a ‘wonderfully beautiful maiden’ just sitting there. Conveniently, she is not naked, but wouldn’t she just about be? Her hair goes ‘down to her very feet’, so maybe she’s rocking a Venus de Milo situation. She still can’t speak, so the King gently takes her away and brings her to the castle and gives her a beautiful dress and OH MY GOODNESS now we’re the Little Mermaid. 
• Anyhoo, the King marries her. She is able to ‘nod her head a little’, so, hopefully she could give consent. She has a kid a year later. It’s a boy. 
• Later that night, Mary shows up, and she’s feeling more vengeful than I’m comfortable with, because OH MY GOODNESS she pulls a fairy-tale villain stunt. She basically says that if our unnamed protagonist doesn’t ‘fess up to opening that thirteenth door, Mary’s gonna take the child. 
• Mary gives the new queen back her voice for a second (is Mary Ursula???? So many questions), but for some reason the new queen’s still really stuck on perpetuating her obvious lie. Mary, accordingly, takes the newborn baby and goes to Heaven…which, if we’re counting, she’s done twice, now. Was having the raddest baby of all time not enough for her? 
• The people of the kingdom, on earth, are really not jazzed about their new baby prince vanishing overnight. Rumors run rampant about how the lovely (mute) queen is probably a cannibal, which, wow. Luckily, her husband the King is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. They get pregnant again a few months later, and the queen has another kid. It’s a boy! 
• Mary does her thing again, showing up in the hospital room and putting another ultimatum before the new mom, and, like, this has got to be a pride parable or something because our girl obviously doesn’t admit what she’s done. Mary takes the kid and vanishes. 
• Now, the people of the kingdom are openly mocking their queen, and the King’s got a preponderance of evidence that doesn’t exactly make his wife look good. But, for some reason, he just tells his people to be quiet and doesn’t try to learn what happened or put any safeguards in place and definitely just … does it again, hoping for a different outcome. (Fairy tale characters are actually insane.) 
• For the third time, Mary shows up after the queen gives birth to her third child—a daughter. This time, Mary takes the queen up to heaven again and shows her how her two eldest children are doing. (Here’s a visual: They’re smiling, and ‘playing with the ball of the world.’)
• Even with that incentive, the queen persists in her lie OH MY GOSH. Come on!!!!! Anyway, I’m sure that strategy works well for her family. 
• It doesn’t. The queen was labelled a man-eater (heyyo) and the King had to let her go to trial, because the third time’s a charm. 
• Because she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t defend herself, so everyone started to put together the stuff for a burning-at-the-stake-party. Fun! 
• As the fire’s burning around her (fun!), she repented. Mary, watching, gave her back her voice, and the queen confessed, loudly, to her crime. 
• Immediately rain fell from the sky, extinguishing the flames, and Mary came down from heaven with the queen’s three children. The family was reunited, the woman got her life back, and we are left with the obvious moral: “He who repents his sin and acknowledges it, is forgiven.” 

Well, that was a ride. The next one’s called ‘The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.” Will he learn? Will WE learn? What happened to the youths who went first, second, and third to learn about the nature of fear? (Sorry.) Tune in next time, hopefully next Wednesday, probably; and then, after that, I’m going to start compiling my Life According to Grimm listicle, cataloguing all of the fun stuff we’re learning about living that fairytale life.