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

night, I would feel guilty that I wasn’t spending as much time with my children as I would have preferred. On the other hand, I also knew there were a lot of full-time mothers at the high school who didn’t work and whose children did not turn out that great despite the quantity of “quality time.” I think what made a difference to my children was that I never made a big deal about what I did. It was really just about the work and to make a better life for all of us. They could also see that I loved my job, and I think they always knew how much I loved them.

Whenever possible, I would take the children out on the road with me and incorporate them into what I was doing. From time to time, they would appear in the shows. For example, Joe and Barbara played little Polynesian children in South Pacific, and later Lizzie and Barbara worked in another production. They also had roles in The Sound of Music. Robert and Lizzie did Annie Get Your Gun with me, playing my little brother and sister. I was so proud of them. As adults, they look back on those times as some of their fondest memories from childhood. They each have retained a love and knowledge of music, theater, and television.

If I had to go out on the road while they were at school, I tried to stay on top of what they were doing and what their appointments might be to the degree that they used to always think I had eyes in the back of my head. We would leave notes to each other that we would hide in special places. When I came back, they would always make a big sign to greet me at the door saying “welcome home.” I’m sure that they missed me and experienced loneliness and loss just as I did being away from them. I prayed that they were understanding and forgiving about my drive to express myself through my work and why it was so important to me. In the final analysis, your children know it when you genuinely love them. If you don’t, they know that too, and it doesn’t matter how much you do for them, you won’t make up for that.

I am sure there were many parts of the package of being my son or daughter that they would have gladly done without. What a pain it must have been if a classmate wanted to become friends with them so they could get to know me. Even worse, teachers could on occasion be harder on the kids because of my celebrity status. “You think you’re so special, blah, blah, blah,” one nasty teacher snapped at Lizzie. When she told me about it after school one day, I immediately called for an appointment to meet with this teacher. I called her out on it.

“Look, this is my job. I work, and I don’t appreciate that you take it out on my child. So I would really appreciate it if you didn’t do that.” The teacher was trying to look younger than her years in her pink dress with bleached blonde hair adorned with a big bow. What was also noticeable was a very big chip on her shoulder. She apologized.

To a fault, I was maybe a little too protective of my kids. Sometimes you need to back off a little and let them try to take care of their issues the best they can for their own development’s sake. Chalk it up to the fact that I had to take care of so many things on my own as a kid without the intervention of a loving adult. I didn’t want them to always have to deal with that sort of thing. Again, it’s not always the recommended action. In the final tally, I trust that the good outweighed the bad for my children, and that they came to terms with whatever they felt they might have lacked at times. This feeling came forward for me in a song my son Joseph wrote called “Red River.” It’s about all the red taillights you see on the highway, and the hope that it is transporting people home to a loving situation.

Ira was commuting back and forth, arriving in L.A. on Friday and leaving to go back to his job in New York on Sunday night. That’s the way it was, and on some deeper level I probably preferred it that way and consequently went to a lot of places and events by myself. Otherwise, I might have put my foot down. “Get a job out here, for God’s sake. You’re well respected in the theater business. It shouldn’t be a problem.” I never demanded that. Rather late in the game, he did just that, but by then it hardly mattered. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It doesn’t. A steady diet of separation for long periods is not constructive on any level.

One Sunday as Ira was preparing to return to New York, all the drains in the sinks, toilets, showers, and bathtubs backed up, and a stinky tide of raw sewage began to flow. Ira had to catch his plane. I gritted my teeth and said to him sarcastically, “Fine. You go. I’ll take care of it.” Talk about symbolism! Reality is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Pauline was a godsend on many levels during this period because I was worry-free with her in charge as a second mother to the children (and no doubt to me, as well as being my older sister). She was very smart, and as a divorcee, had a chance to reinvent her life. She eventually got a job at Cedars-Sinai hospital and moved into her own apartment. After a while, she felt that she should move back to Kentucky to be closer to her kids, and I encouraged that. She had given a lot of years to me, and