Writer ‘worthy’ of praise for new books

By Judy Babb

Author and nearly 80-year-old Dr. Anne Worth worked as a professional counselor before retiring in 2021. She started as a counselor in 1975. Since 2021, she’s continued using her professional talents to help children through grief with her ever-growing book series: “Tessie’s Tears.” 

Although Worth never had children of her own, she talks about the children she claims and who call her mother. Those include a number of Sudanese refugees and a Russian boy who she talks to regularly although, because of the Ukrainian-Russian war, she can no longer visit him. “I’m the only mother he ever had,” she said. The Sudanese boys who live in the area consider her a mother as well, calling her Mama Anne.

The pandemic caused issues for a lot of people. For Worth, the pandemic was her inspiration for writing children’s books.

“I never thought about writing a children’s book,” Worth said. “But children are hearing about death every day.”

Currently two books — a third will be out in December — help children deal with the death of loved ones, or friends who move away. Currently available in the “Tessie’s Tears” series are “Grampy Goes to Heaven” and “Molly Moves Away.” 

Available for Christmas will be “Corkie the Rescue Puppy.” Corkie gets lost or perhaps dies. Worth is still working on how the book will end. Worth is considering Tessie’s family moving from town and opening an animal rescue on a farm.

“This last book is the hardest one for me,” Worth said of Corkie. “The death of a dog is hard on everyone.”

Worth has dealt with her own demons, which led to her decision to change her last name. She didn’t want to use her ex-husband’s name or her maiden name. Her list of choices was long but none of them fulfilled her needs. It wasn’t until a friend said to her, “I just wish you knew how much you are worth to me.” 

“I saw my name,” she said. “It really was an unconscious thing.”

The change of surname reminds Worth she matters. She uses that same goal in her books — to teach everyone, especially children, that they have worth. She said parents have told her they are as touched by the books as the children they read them to. She helps two audiences with one so-called stone.

“[The year] 2020 was a time in my own life when I felt lonely and sad about many things,” Worth said. “I couldn’t imagine how children were feeling being away from their friends and surrounded by the news of death day and night. 

“As I journaled about my own feelings, I could picture a little girl who always had a tear ready to fall from her eyes at any moment.”

Worth decided to write about the little girl to help children have an outlet for their feelings.

The little girl in the story is named after Worth’s good friend Teresa. 

Worth said as Tessie began to tell her story, the reasons for her sadness leaped off the page: she lost a grandparent, she lost a friend and she lost her puppy.

Worth plans to continue to write about Tessie and says that the books almost write themselves. 

She said the ideas for the topics for the books are endless. 

“As Tessie began to tell her story, the reasons for her sadness are evident,” Worth said. “As I write her story, other issues arise — adoption, divorce, childhood illness and more.”

While she was talking, another idea came to her: Tessie misses her divorced father, who she was used to seeing daily. 

Worth explains her own issues. 

“I was divorced, and I had experienced a lot of difficulties in my life,” she said. “Because of that I didn’t feel like I had a lot of value as a person. I was trying to give myself worth rather than getting it from the outside.”

Then she became ill with the autoimmune disease lupus and became bedridden. That’s when she started looking at spirituality. She became a Christian, a perspective she uses in all her children’s books. 

Then things changed for her.

“I realized I was feeling well,” Worth said. “I thought I was in remission.”

She went to her doctor, and testing showed that she no longer had any antibodies for lupus.

“I was healed,” she said. “I rose from the ashes.”

She said her belief in God is what healed her. She wants parents to know that perspective as they share her books with them.

Her renewed health was the impetus for her professional writing. She told her own story in “Call Me Worthy: Unlocking a Painful Past for a Glorious Future.” She wrote the book while she was still working as a therapist.

“I got up every morning at 4 a.m. to work on my book,” she said of the grueling process of looking back at her life. The Tessie books followed.

The long list of ideas for Tessie will keep Worth helping others. Writing the book also helped her. “You can finish well. I keep reinventing myself,” she said. “Now is a real exciting time of my life.”

All her books are available on Amazon. Additionally, Worth provides local libraries copies of her books and gives readings at Sunday schools and Vacation Bible Schools.

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