Life Is Not a Stage by Florence Henderson (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Dr. House and the House Ear Institute, as well as other institutions that deal with the hearing impaired. I will never forget doing a show with the children at the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York. We performed “Do Re Mi” together, and the children sang along and kept rhythm by feeling the vibrations in the floor. One beautiful girl sang “The Sound of Music” and it was inspiring and uplifting to see how she tried so hard to stay on pitch and quite often succeeded.

Once the problem was identified and healed, I realized that some of the issues that I was beginning to experience with stage fright might have had their origin with my gradually deteriorating ability to hear. It was yet another challenge that life served up to me that fortunately had a lasting solution.

But that was hardly the end of the story. Solving the hearing problem set some gears into motion that would take me far into uncharted terrain and ultimately shatter my carefully ordered world. So much for best-laid plans!

Back in the old days, women of childbearing age with otosclerosis were routinely sterilized to prevent them from further deterioration and becoming completely deaf. Luckily for me there was another option. Father Charles Whelan, a Jesuit priest and a cousin of mine, was worried about my situation. “Look, you’ve already had four children. Your health and your livelihood are at risk.” He granted me special church dispensation to take birth control pills, which had cleared the FDA and become available to the general public only a few years earlier. Needless to say, Father Whelan was on the progressive wing. Around this time, he wrote a highly controversial article for America, a Catholic publication he coedited, entitled “Why Does Every Act of Love Have to Be an Act of Life?” You can imagine how that got the fur flying.

For about ten years starting in 1958, the Catholic Church gave permission to use the pill strictly for the treatment of disorders linked to the reproductive system, such as mine. However, Pope Paul VI yanked it away in 1968 with his Humanae Vitae encyclical. But if my example was in any way typical, the church had every right to fear the societal change in its wake. They wanted to stuff those pills and the genie back in the bottle pronto!

The pill held the promise to finally give every woman control over her body and give couples like Ira and me the possibility of worry-free sex. In my particular case, yes to the first part, but no to the second. It was a given fact that the rhythm method was a colossal failure for us. Fact number two was that I was obviously very fertile, not such a surprise given my parents’ ability to produce babies like a factory production line. But fact number three was that changing longstanding patterns in our relationship instantly by swallowing a little magic potion was sadly not in the cards.

On the surface, the rhythm method’s greatest effectiveness is killing any sense of spontaneity in a relationship. Never mind that it also flies in the face of our natural instincts by commanding a woman not to have sex at the time of the month when she’s ovulating and hardwired to desire it the most.

We had been married for over a decade before the pill came into my life. Up to that point, the patterns of how we related to each other were all deeply ingrained if not totally locked in. There were no other options. I had married young and so totally inexperienced, unlike young people in later generations who had the opportunity to experiment or try other lifestyle options before settling down. With marriage and immediate pregnancy, I was thrown right away into a whirlwind of responsibility and expectation. Hook, line, and sinker, I bought in to the concept of domestic perfection, i.e., this is about as good as it is going to be, so suck it up. Being the eternal optimist, I always looked at the bright side. I embraced the good and tolerated the bad.

The Catholic News painted a rosy picture of our life in an article about ten months after Lizzie’s birth. It sounds like one of those picture-perfect family sitcoms of the early 1960s. “With a common sense, matter-of-fact approach to life, the blue-eyed, diminutive singer manages successfully to raise a large family and have an expanding career and has done so for ten years.…‘You have to pray a lot and take vitamin pills,’ she quipped.…Miss Henderson’s busy schedule provides so much variety that no two days are alike, except where her family is concerned. Her household roars from 6:45 a.m. to nine at night—except for the school hours and when she sees them off to school, makes sure the homework is done and eats dinner with the children, as well as puts them to bed. After that, the Bernsteins relax and have a couple hours together, calling it a day around 1 a.m. Even though the pace is fantastic and requires her constant attention, Florence Henderson sparkles and looks like a woman who enjoys the challenge of giving both jobs [as an entertainer and a mother/wife] the best she’s got to give.”

I loved Ira for all the right reasons. He was a great companion and father, a warm and caring lover, and a supportive partner on so many levels. But he was very worried (and for good cause) that I was going to have a baby every nine months. Not surprisingly, I think this created a deep underlying tension. I felt rejected, and it opened my old wounds around this issue from childhood.

I kept always mindful that Ira’s emotional life as a kid was no picnic either. When he was fourteen years old, his older brother was killed in World War II, shot down over the English Channel. Ira answered the door and received the telegram with the news. From that moment, his relatively happy childhood abruptly came