Peter Pan and Wendy

A firefly landed on the patio table next to me. He was not glowing.

Pulling off my heels, I rested my swollen feet on the table next to him. He didn’t move.

“Can I tell you about my day, honey?” I asked my husband Richard, who had fired up the grill in our backyard.

He looked up and nodded as the firefly crawled closer to the table’s edge.

After practicing medicine for more than twenty years, I was now Chief Operating Officer of a large cancer practice. Earlier that day, I had been asked by my CEO to chair a meeting of health plan representatives. We were negotiating reimbursement for our practice’s services.

I knew three of the four attendees, the exception being a middle-aged man who took a seat to my left. Three of my staff members clustered across from me at the other end of the glass-topped conference table.

The room began to warm as the summer sun’s rays shone through the wall of windows. Ties loosened. Clammy palms left imprints on the tabletop. Chairs creaked as bodies shifted.

I wished I had chosen a cold Perrier instead of a venti Starbucks.

In the back-and-forth discussion of each billing code, we wrangled over how much the health plan company thought each procedure was worth. Occasionally these conversations became tense. I hung tough, continuing to press for what we felt was fair reimbursement.

I heard a deep raspy inhale followed by a short harrumph. Several times.

I realized the gentleman to my left was snorting.

As friction in the room peaked, he blurted, “I would never want to be married to you!”

Silence. The battery-operated wall clock ticked.

My back pressed against the chair as seven pairs of eyes turned toward me.

My thoughts froze. Total blank.

And then an image of my mother flashed in my mind. Mom handing each of my four sisters and me our metal lunch boxes before we got on the school bus. We were often caught in the timeless townies-versus-farm-kids conflicts, and one or another of us always seemed to be the butt of someone’s joke.

In elementary school, it was my hair. Mom always pulled it tightly to the top of my head, then savagely secured it into a topknot—with bobby pins that raked my scalp. As the school day wore on, recess play and my constant scratching at the tight hair loosened strands. It began to look like a bird’s nest.

It was therefore not a huge intellectual leap for the bad boys to start mocking: “Bird’s Nest! Hey, Bird’s Nest! Where do you keep the chicks?”

The taunts were conveniently aided and abetted by my last name—Hawke.

My mom believed that actions spoke louder than words. She instructed us, “Swing your lunch box at a bully if you are being picked on. Just make sure you keep it closed so you don’t lose your sandwich.”  My lunch box featured the Disney animated characters of a flying Peter Pan and, of course, Wendy.

It was a bizarre image at an unlikely moment—Peter and Wendy flying toward this adult bad boy’s head.

I would have preferred that my now otherworldly mother had sent me a brilliant, snappy comeback. Immediately.

No call came from her celestial cellphone.

I had nothing.

Reaching for any words, I retorted to the man in the Brooks Brothers suit, “What makes you think I want to be married to you?”

Shifting to the right, I turned my back to the guy.

I paused to sip some tepid coffee. My fingers trembled. My right leg bounced.

Straightening my spine, I cleared my throat, inhaled deeply, and planted my hands firmly on the table in front of me.

“Let’s move on,” I said. The only sound in the room was the soft shuffle of paper.

That night in our backyard, I related the story to Richard. “I couldn’t come up with a quick response. The thing I don’t understand is why it hit me so hard. It was an insult. And I picked it up and held it.”

“He was being a bully, Wendy,” Richard said, flipping over a sizzling steak.

“But why did he choose that insult? A man would never be told that in a business meeting, no matter how heated. ‘I would never want to be married to you,’” I said. Now I was snorting.

“That was a dumb thing for him to say. And not professional,” Richard responded, swatting away a yellow jacket.

“Well, I felt sucker punched,” I replied, moving my feet from the top of the table to a cushioned teak dining chair. I took a sip of prosecco.

The firefly waved his antennae as if searching for signals.

“And the whole marrying thing,” I said. “It felt so, so … personal.”

Richard nodded but didn’t say anything as he arranged dinner on a ceramic platter.

I spoke slowly, feeling my way through my thoughts. “I guess for a minute, in one sentence from a guy in a meeting, I became that picked-on farm kid again. My hair. My nose. My homemade clothes.”

I continued. Which I tend to do.

“I thought about my Peter Pan and Wendy lunch box. I wanted to deck him with it. But just for a second. Then I remembered. It was my meeting.”

“Well, you know, Wendy did grow up,” Richard said, smiling, as he carried the platter toward me.

He put our food down on the table, leaned over, and kissed my head.

“Okay, boss,” he said. “Just one question. Will you marry me?”

I laughed, loosening the grip on my wineglass as I planted my feet in the grass.

As I reached up to hug Richard, the firefly lifted himself off the table and flew into the night.

Tail-light glowing.

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For more stories of self awareness check out: Recovering Sexagenarian or Imposter for the Win

Love for you to share a moment of self awareness or growing up in comments below.