It's Time to Pull the Pin

Spirit is Whispering....

Welcome back! Or if you’ve found Little Yellow Bird for the first time, glad you’re here. You might want to head over to The Agent of Change Part One if you want to start from the beginning of my journey giving up everything I thought was important in a desperate attempt to heal just about…well….everything. Specifically, if you’ve dealt with or are dealing with fibroids, you might find this story compelling and even reassuring.

If you’ve been following for a while, I apologize for not publishing last week but I have a great excuse! My dog ate my story. :) What I mean to say is that my husband and I got a new puppy and well, the little (adorable) scamp just took up all the time. He now understands that I am a writer and eating my stories is a very naughty thing to do.

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Time to Pull the Pin

It’s time to pull the pin! A few weeks ago I went on a little tangent talking about opening boxes and rummaging through the bric-a-brac of my childhood after moving home. I went just about as far as I could before having to turn back so we didn’t get too (seemingly) far off track of the story at hand. But as our life stories go, oftentimes one cannot possibly relay the big picture without hopping down a few tangential bunny trails first.

Now our little pin regarding the sonnets, (yes, a young man wrote me not one but two sonnets), gets pulled.

When I was a wee little actress at the age of seven (a much younger seven than that of what I see in a typical seven-year-old today), I auditioned for a small role in the play The Miracle Worker (the story of Helen Keller). It was my second audition ever. Though I probably had the moxie to play Helen Keller at the time, I wasn’t yet ripe for such a role. So when I trotted in with my mother to a little room with a desk to audition for the role of “little blind girl” (at the orphanage), a very nice man auditioned me as my Mom watched on. His name was Jerry.

I had practiced all my lines and was ready to please (arf! arf!). After every cue Jerry gently gave, I rushed in with a crammed alphabet soup back in his lap as if the game was to see how fast I could spew out the words. He smiled, gently stopping me, and very quietly asked me to say the line slowly and sadly:

“Annie, please don’t go away where the sun is fierce.”

Little monkey that I was, I complied, in the same rhythm and tone that was given me.

I got the part. From that moment on, I would work with Jerry as my director throughout my childhood and up until my senior year of high school. Jerry quickly became a father figure in my life where that role had been unsteady for me since toddlerhood. He was good to me. Firm when I got out of control in rehearsal (especially in the early teen years) and disciplined and mentored me as I grew up in the theatre.

Jerry was once a judge in a high school Shakespearean monologue competition where I’d gotten some special “coaching” from an acting teacher. I didn’t come near winning, and we didn’t speak of it until, once again, he’d cast me later that same year.

This father-director told me after rehearsal (while he waited with me for my late arriving parents) how horrible I was in that competition and how embarrassed he was for me. For he knew someone had “gotten a hold of me.” It was a shameful moment. But he told me the truth. (I really was that bad.) Clearly he still believed in me or I wouldn’t have been receiving this brutal truth while rehearsing in his production.

At age seventeen I was cast in his production of Brighton Beach Memoirs. It would be the last time I worked with Jerry in my home town before going off to college and out into the world of professional theatre.

And this, friend, is where the pin gets pulled.

I fell head over heels for the boy playing the lead role. The crush was wild and intense as they go.

Yet different.

He really didn’t give me the time of day other than a professional working relationship, enjoying the natural friendliness that goes along with the instant family feel that a new cast enjoys.

But I was relentless, younger in spirit than my years, and therefore not interested or even knowledgeable of the games would-be lovers play.

I simple adored him, had no desire to hide it, and everyone, including him, knew it.

I’d never had a real boyfriend. (Believe me when I tell you that the arc of how this all played out is on my list of “next plays” that I intend to write.)

For his part there was never any entertainment or intention of taking me seriously.

But one day, late in the run of performances, something shifted.

There was another cast member who consistently teased me about this crush. Unbothered, I continued my show of love. One day between shows as we sat down to eat, (in the “boys” dressing room at a card table, for I would always be found there), this Instigator said we should go around the table and say what we wanted most in the world.

Ha! Can you imagine?

You probably think I outed myself right there. But as the Holy Spirit works, in a whisper hijacking all that the enemy would have you claim for his purposes, this shift happened through silence.

When it came to my turn, I paused. And it is in that pause where The Instigator leaped in.

“Oh come on, Fleur, we all know that all you want is Peter!”

While it would have been understandable for me to have thrown the nearest cup of water in his face and huff off or say something uncreatively predictable like “gimme a break”, this is where the Holy Spirit matured me, unbeknownst by silencing me. And in that silence, I owned the truth without shame or regret about what was just said. I affirmed my love with dignity and grace seeking eye contact from no one.

And that was the moment that Peter fell in love with me.

Because I did not deny him.

Now. It would take another series of blogs to explain to you the depth, love – innocent and pure - of what we experienced throughout the next nine months. It would take another chapter to explain to you that he was a practicing Catholic and I was not and what the ripple effect meant to my mother who was fiercely anti-Catholic (ex-Catholic) and made no attempt to hide it. One day I will take you through all that happened. But to continue my miracle year with you and bring you back more into the “present-past” I’ll have to barrel through.

By the time I broke up with Peter nine months later (after falling deeply in love, convinced that I would marry him), I had now been persuaded that he only wanted to marry me so he could “keep me from all my dreams”, “keep me from going to college”, and “get me pregnant starting a family”. (Oh the horror!) This was all peppered with the certainty that if I ever was in the delivery room and he had to choose between “you or that baby”, he’d choose the baby. Slam dunk.

There’s much more but hopefully this gives you the broad perspective.

By the time we broke up I was convinced he was the biggest weirdest and most dangerous man with which I could ever get entangled.

From that moment on - radio silence.

For twenty-eight years.

This was the boy who wrote me two love sonnets. The boy who bravely met with my mother to try to explain, unsuccessfully, that he didn’t want to keep me from my dreams, marry me right away or in fact use me in that way that the world teaches we flagrantly can (and even should) be in relationship.

He wanted to truly love me even if it meant that we should separate. But if so, he wanted that to happen naturally.

What mother wouldn’t appreciate this kind of man wanting to spend the rest of his life with her daughter?

Mine.

Our mutual father figure director, Jerry, I would learn – was there for the grieving young man to see him through the fallout of heartbreak. Especially after I brought a new boyfriend to see him in a play. (I know. Horrible.) Peter was found after the show in the dressing room alone, head down, slumped over in despair. Jerry walked in and simply put his hand on Peter’s shoulder.

Peter would do several shows with Jerry in subsequent seasons.

In September of 2013, just a couple of months after my arrival in Austin and having my first wake-up call about what it would take to heal from the ever-increasing balls of capillaries in my abdomen and stomach, I found one day through social media this director who had been so important to both Peter and I, had died.

I immediately thought of the young man whose sonnet I’d recently read in a box filled with things my mother had saved. How had it gotten by her?

By the same supernatural power that vividly begins to take over from hereon.