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

deal? People are getting divorced all the time. Why not be done with it? What’s standing in your way?

The truth, to put it bluntly, was that I didn’t have the balls to go through with it. I had plenty of explanations for not doing it. First, there were the restrictions of Catholicism. I had lived my life this way for so long under the same indoctrination. If I should ever choose to remarry, then I wouldn’t be allowed to receive the sacraments in the church.

Then, talk about being codependent, I was worried about who was going to take care of Ira and what was going to happen to him without me. Above all, I thought about the effect on the children. Divorce law in New York would not take kindly to my situation, and there was always the possibility that I could lose custody of the children.

Part of the trap was my desire to please everybody and receive the affection from others that had been so lacking from my mother. On the positive side, I knew what rejection felt like, and my caring came across as genuine, whether I was acting through Carol Brady or stopping a moment to take a picture with someone. I did not want to do anything to hurt someone’s feelings.

So I sublimated my deeper-seated emotional needs in work and in living for my children. I was not ready to be honest with myself yet and say, “This isn’t working for me, and I know there must be another way.” The tools and the confidence needed to get out of the trap I had built for myself were not present…until two major events happened in rapid succession that forced the issue.

When I was forty-eight years old, I had a hysterectomy. There were certainly legitimate medical reasons for it, notably pain, dysplasia, and bleeding. There was also a part of me that naively hoped that it would help our marriage, but that expectation was equally as disappointing as when I went on the pill. From that standpoint, it was a total mistake.

I had grown to be a great believer in the mind-body connection. I thought about my older sister who was so miserable. She had had this operation and that operation. Little by little, they were cutting pieces of her away. “What will be next?” I thought after the hysterectomy. It was a tap on the shoulder that I needed to face some hard facts and seek some answers, and fast.

Just as the organs of my motherhood were removed, my mother suffered a stroke and was dying. I got the phone call from my sister while I was still in the hospital recovering. She was eighty-eight years old and had dementia. My sister Marty told me that my mother had paralysis on her right side as a result of the stroke. She had still been pretty sharp up until age eighty-two. Her second husband (whom she had married when she was seventy-five years old) had recently died, and she had had gallbladder surgery. We had decided that she shouldn’t be alone. She would have been a perfect candidate for assisted living and would have thrived in that environment because she loved playing cards, bowling, and other social activities. But at that time, those places were not the norm, so she went to live a more isolated existence with my sister. However, Marty was the only one of us at the time who wasn’t tied down, so she went to Florida to live with my mother.

“I can’t stand it here anymore,” my mother said and repeated again in subsequent phone conversations. I am convinced that she would have lived longer and been healthier had she been in a retirement community, and I always felt bad about that.

I had asked her once about dying. Although she had quite a gruff manner and a rough mouth, she remained a religious woman.

“I just don’t ever want to be a burden to anybody,” she told me. I prayed that my mother would go peacefully and quickly.

I told my sister, “Just don’t let them hook her up to life support. Just let her go.”

I could hardly stand up straight with the pain as I got on the plane for Florida to go to her funeral. So much went through my mind, one moment full of emotion and the next remarkably lacking of it. I thought of the time on The Brady Bunch when I had to play Carol Brady’s own grandmother and how I played that character as tough-talking but funny, modeled on my mother. I thought of her appearing with me on The Mike Douglas Show doing exercises on the floor lifting a bowling ball with their fitness expert. She was strong, and if you asked her what she bowled, it was always 250 no matter what. She had boyfriends. She loved those times I invited her to Las Vegas, when she could sit at the blackjack table until all hours of the night. As she got older, I cherished the moments I had to take care of her, brushing her hair and doing her makeup. Her gruff ways softened somewhat around the edges with age. But she still said, “You’re not too old to be spanked,” and she meant it!

She looked beautiful in the casket. I thought of all the positive lessons from her example. Survival. Independence. Courage. But with recovery from the surgery and everything else brewing, there was little energy left for much outpouring of emotion or grief. I had seen the finality of things so many times before, but now the message was different. On a subconscious level, I knew that I had to do something or I would die. Too many people, including myself, were living lives of quiet desperation. It was time to grow. I also knew that once I truly opened up to that, it would be impossible to turn back. My mother left my father when she was forty-nine years old. My sister Pauline