The Road from No to Yes, You Got This

May 18, 2017

When I was a little girl, I used to watch the Miss America and Miss Universe pageants and strut around the living room trying to emulate their catwalk. Someday I was certain that I would be in a pageant myself. We all grow up thinking we are beautiful because hopefully our mothers told us we were and we haven’t yet begun comparing ourselves to everyone else. By the time I was 14 and had been a whopping 4’11” tall for the past 3 years, it didn’t take me long to realize that Miss America and Miss Universe were typically at least able to reach the ground with their feet regardless of what chair they sat in. For this reason and so much more, I was not Miss-Anything material. I am OK with that.

When I was a little girl, I went and saw the Nutcracker. I immediately fell in love with performance art. I loved the music, the dance and the performance. I already had a natural gift for music. I could carry a tune and play some songs by ear on the piano. I just needed to learn how to dance like those beautiful girls on stage dance. I needed training. My parents said no. They let my brother learn how to play guitar and he didn’t do anything with it, so they weren’t going to waste their time and money on me.

I did do theatre throughout my childhood, adolescence and into my early college years. I’ll get to why I stopped doing theatre in a little while. I’ll get to why I stopped each of these things in a little while. But first, music, then dance. When I was in school, music education was still part of the curriculum. We had a music teacher come and teach us “do re me” and different musical instruments and sounds once a week. Elementary school was split into primary and upper grades. Upper graders (grades 4-6) could volunteer once a week in the Kindergarten classrooms. Guess what I did and what day I chose to do it on once I reached 4^th grade? One day, we learned about the glockenspiel. I had already had music class before I volunteered that day and when no one in the Kindergarten class could guess what the name of the musical instrument was, I chimed in “glockenspiel”. The music teacher quickly figured out that I was volunteering on this particular day of the week each week on purpose. She went on to teach me many things, including how to play the glockenspiel and the xylophone. She taught me that notes went from A to G and where to find those notes on the piano and the aforementioned instruments. In 5^th grade, I asked my parents if I could join band. Once again, the answer was no.

School became really hard for me in 7^th grade when I had to switch to middle school. I didn’t do so well this year, so I was determined to do the very best that I could in 8^th grade so that I could be in Troubadours (choir). I had wanted to join the choir at church, but my father said no. This was my opportunity to be in a choir and I couldn’t afford to let bad grades blow it for me. I had a 3.5 GPA this year. Mrs. Cordero, the Troubadour teacher, taught us how to read music and had us choose a song, any song, to demonstrate our ability to read music well enough to play a song. I chose Amazing Grace. It didn’t take me very long to learn how to play it, not because I was exceptional at reading music (the truth of the matter is that I suck at it, but I do fine at basic notation), but because I can play by ear. If I can hum it, I can play it.

When I was 14, my dad brought home an old upright organ that this lady was just going to throw out. My father used to be a Eucharistic minister for our church and would take communion to the Catholics in the nearby convalescent home. They had a piano and an organ in their recreation/cafeteria room. I would go with my dad every Sunday and play piano. At first, I just played for my dad. I had virtually no clue what I was doing; I just knew how to make it sound like I did. Before long, I had an ever growing audience. I became part of their weekly recreation. I played a few songs that I had figured out by ear and winged it the rest of the time. So, he knew that I would play the hell out of this organ. Up to this point, the only instrument that I had was a little monophonic Casio I bought myself with Christmas money when I was 11. I figured out how to play a whole bunch of Depeche Mode songs and one day started playing “Someday” while my brother was in the shower in the room next to mine. He came tearing out of there with a towel on and asked me to do it again. Finally I would be taken seriously. My family bought me a regular polyphonic keyboard for my 15^th birthday. Any formal training would still be up to me. I guess since my parents paid for some of my college and some of college was spent learning music, you can say they paid for some formal training. Can you imagine how much better I would have been if they had taken me seriously years ago instead of comparing me to my brother?

I learned dance in much the same way – purely incidentally with some lucky breaks. Probably the greatest instructor was high school musical theatre. I had no choice but to learn how to pirouette and jete my way across the stage. My parents paid for some formal training here too in college.

I continued to do theatre, dance and music in college. I even recorded an entire album of music, but I had a very strict father who would never let me go anywhere. What good does an entire album of music do me if I can never go anywhere to perform it? In retrospect, I wish I could have had that “but I’m an adult” shouting match with my father, but I didn’t. I did what I was told and what I was always told was “no”. No, I cannot have music lessons. No, I cannot go to Berklee College of Music (they were interested). No, I cannot major in Theatre in college. There’s no work there. Turns out, English was not that lucrative a major either. No, you cannot go to this place or that place to do anything. No. No. No. Always no.

Yes, you can get married to a man who will continue the tradition of telling you no and strip you of everything but your constant insistence on dancing around the house. We moved to Missouri because his mother and siblings lived there and the cost of living is cheaper. I probably conceived our first child on our wedding night. She was born in March of 1999, about 10 months after we were married. Three months later, I would come down sick with chronic bronchitis that would last until February of 2000 and damage my vocal chords to the point of needing vocal therapy. So, this is why I stopped doing it all. My soprano was gone and my voice in general had become inconsistent, particularly with higher notes. I was married for 14 years to a man who did not want me to do theatre anymore. I could do music, but I cannot perform it. I have to stay home, have babies and then work to take care of those babies while he spends half of the marriage unemployed and blaming me for our financial woes. At least now I could cut my hair if I wanted.

There is a whole larger story here, obviously. For the purpose of this entry alone however, I am sticking to the arts, with the exception of the little story about pageants. Sometimes we just have to accept that we are not tall enough or beautiful enough for a beauty pageant. We are what we are. We do not have to accept that we are not talented enough to be successful at theatre, music or dance. We do not have to accept that there isn’t work there. Even if we are not rich and famous artists, there is always work to be done there. We do not have to accept setbacks as a life sentence. We do not have to accept “no” for an answer.

The controlling father is still around and still tries to control, but he’s old and gray now and someday will be completely out of the way. The controlling husband is out of the picture. My kids are older now; one of them is even an adult. I raised them to believe they can do whatever they put their mind to, even when everyone else is telling them no. I tell them no to bad decisions. I do not tell them no to their dreams. I am not my father. I am not their father. I am the dreamer who wishes I never listened to my naysayers.

I sometimes think my time is up. I had my chances and I didn’t take any of them because of always being told no. Maybe it is. But I still have the desire to be on stage doing theatre and music. I may have a lot of old injuries, chronic pain, and limitations, but I can still dance, even if sometimes painfully. I have ideas in my head that I never do anything with because my ex-husband got rid of all of my old writings and I figure, “What’s the point?” My time has come and gone and there is no longer any evidence it ever existed. I have ideas in my head that I think are too lofty and crazy to attempt. One such idea came to mind the other night as I was listening to My Fair Lady, “Hymn to Him”. Why can’t a woman be more like a man? Men are, after all, superior to women right? We are subordinate to them. We have to do what they say because they’re above us. The Bible says so. They were created first. Blah, blah, blah… What if they were created first because they were the rough draft?

I have let most of my life be dictated by the whims of men. I have let their voices become the voices I constantly hear inside my head. I have long equated “no” with can’t. Now I find myself encouraged by a few people who say “Why not?” instead of “no”. My excuses of “I’m too old now,” “I don’t have time,” “I can’t because . . .” are met with a certain look; a look that says “you’re making excuses,” “you’re getting in your own way,” “you don’t truly believe that,” and just plain “bullshit” all in one glance. Following this look is something in the realm of “find a way to make it happen” or, the favorite line of one person in particular, “you got this”. When I came up with the craziest writing idea of my life, he managed to find a small, seafoam green colored (pretty close to my favorite color), lined, journal-style notebook that read “you got this” on the cover to write down my ideas. It’s kind of impractical to walk around carrying a piano and a laptop.