When I was a teenager living in my grandmother’s cold, formal apartment, she chastised me for still reading fairy tales. “You’re trying to escape reality,” she told me. The therapist I saw said I was trying to regain the world of my childhood – the world in which my parents still lived. She was closer to the truth, but not entirely on target. It wasn’t the world of my parents I was trying to recapture, it was myself. All those tales about children lost in the woods, princesses forced to live under the dominion of evil stepmothers, mothers watching over their children as trees or animals, princes charmed into beasts or frogs … were all stories about seeing through illusion into the truth. Perhaps my parents had told me these stories so I would know how to survive in a world in which they were absent, or they were meant to tell me who I really was.

There was one story in particular that my father and mother both loved to tell me. It was called “Tam Lin” and it came, my father always clarified, not from a fairy tale but from an old Scottish ballad. Which was the same as a fairy tale, my mother always added.

A girl named Jennet was forbidden to go to a ruined castle in the woods – Carterhaugh, the haunt of ghosts and boggles and the “good neighbors” who weren’t good at all. But Jennet, despite the warnings, goes to Carterhaugh, because the castle once belonged to her people and she is determined to reclaim it. When she plucks a rose from the ruins, a young man appears, a handsome prince in green velvet and plaid. He tells her he is Tam Lin, the young laird of the castle, kidnapped by the fairy queen to live eternally in the Ever-Fair where no one ages or dies. Only on that very night, All Hallow’s Eve, when he rides with the fey they will sacrifice him as their tithe to hell. The only one who can save him is his own true human love, who must wait by the holy well and pull him from his horse as he rides by. Then she must hold onto him, no matter what shape he takes, until he is human again. This Jennet does, holding onto him while he becomes a snake, a lion, and then a burning brand – all the while keeping faith that what she held in her arms was her own true love.

“Because,” my mother said at the end of the story, “sometimes love requires a leap of faith.” She would smile at my father then and he’d press her hand to his lips, as courteously as any prince in any fairy tale, and I would feel encircled by love.