“Take a breath,” my mother would say, getting down to my level to look me in the eye. That only worked so well. If you want someone to calm down, try telling them “calm down” and see where it gets you. But Connie had another idea, something that worked with other people who stuttered. Singing.
“What you’re trying to say,” Mom said to me one day, “sing it to me.”
I turned the phrase over in my mind, smoothing the edges of its consonants and vowels until the words became the breaths of a song. A lyric I could control.
“I want Cheeeeeeri-ohhhhs,” I sang. I can’t describe that release. The rush of simply being understood.
“Yes, you can have Cheerios,” my mother yelled. “You can have whatever you want! You sound so beautiful.”
For the next two years, singing was the only time I didn’t stutter. I sang for everything I wanted, like some Disney princess making a wish. Around four, the stutter became more pronounced and my parents took me to a therapist. He used art therapy and asked me to draw myself in the family. I drew my parents standing in front of our house, then put myself inside looking out from a window. He told my parents I had a fear of abandonment. Looking back, I know my parents never left me alone, and maybe I was even around them too much. But somehow, I still had a fear that they would leave me.
I kept going, and the stutter resolved. I stayed shy, though, and it didn’t really help that our family was constantly moving. We would move eighteen times before I hit fifth grade. You move around a lot working in the Baptist church, but my father was especially restless. Even when he left the ministry for a few years when I was little to see what it would be like for us to actually have money, he kept accepting transfers from his job selling postage meters for Pitney Bowes.
He usually gave my mom and me one month’s notice. “Say bye to your friends.” The ones I had just made. Even with my shyness, I learned to adjust until change was maybe not easy but expected.
We were briefly living in Waco when my sister Ashlee was born in October 1984. I was four and had prayed for a sister. I stopped every single person I saw at the hospital to bring them to the nursery.
“That’s my sister,” I said, over and over again. I didn’t care if you were a nurse or doctor who had somewhere to be. You were going to see this baby girl. That night, I had a temper tantrum when Nana and Papaw, my mother’s parents, said they were taking me to stay the night at their house. I didn’t want Ashlee to spend the night without me. She was my baby. When she came home, I kept putting a little pallet beneath her crib so I could sleep under her. When she was one, and we were living in Littleton, Colorado, Ashlee began to climb out of her crib and sneak into my room to sleep with me. Every morning, my mother would find us snuggled like two little puppies.
We moved to Littleton in September 1985, the only time we left Texas during my childhood. I think my dad was escaping something. His father, my Papa, had died suddenly in May of 1985 at age sixty-four. He had been a beloved Southern Baptist preacher after serving as a U.S. Army sergeant in World War II—the nicest man on the planet. I just remember he had massive hands and this great big belly laugh. He always sat on a recliner, and I would tickle his feet just to hear him laugh. He died while my parents were on a trip to Hawaii that they had saved up for and probably still couldn’t afford. They left me with my mom’s parents and Ashlee with dad’s. Papa showed up two hours early to get Ashlee the morning of the trip, and the change in plans infuriated my dad. He didn’t feel like entertaining his father. “I’ve got stuff to do,” he yelled at Papa. They got on the plane and he never saw Papa again. He died of a heart attack while they were in Hawaii. One minute he was mowing the lawn, the next he was gone.
After that, my dad felt lost. We moved to Colorado and didn’t even go to church. The irony is that my dad got a job selling to churches—supplies like choir robes and stained glass. I thought he sold BMWs because he drove one and it was all he talked about.
Littleton was magic to a Texas girl, so opposite to what I knew. I’d only seen snow in picture books about Santa Claus, so there was a magic to it. We moved just before I started kindergarten and I liked school, even if the day sort of peaked with The Pledge of Allegiance. I loved hearing our voices in unison with our hands on our hearts making this solemn vow that felt important. I was just never going to be the best student, because I didn’t know yet that I was a different kind of learner. It was hard for me to focus in school, and as the teacher talked my mind wouldn’t just wander off. It would take off running like a track star. By the time I realized I wasn’t listening, I’d accidentally given my mind such a head start that I could never catch up. But if we went on a field trip, I could tell you all about where we went and what we learned. I told myself I was more of a life experience type, and I would rather travel to the place that we were talking about and form my own opinion than be told what was important.
The morning of January 28, 1986, we kindergarteners sat on the floor—criss-cross applesauce—to watch the Challenger space shuttle launch. Our class had spent a couple weeks learning about space and planets in preparation, because our school was one of the many in America that NASA TV had hooked up with a live viewing of the launch. NASA made a big deal about that flight because it was the first time a “normal” non-astronaut was going into space. Christa McAuliffe, a social studies teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was picked from thousands of applicants in NASA’s Teacher in Space Project. We were all excited, because when else did we get to watch TV in school?
At 9:38 a.m., we watched as the Challenger blew up in a ball of white smoke. At first, we thought it was the blastoff moment. I think even our teachers did. And then there was just nothing in the air. A teacher turned off the TV, but it was too late. A room full of five-year-olds had just watched seven people die and there was no hiding that fact. They were there, and then they were gone. Let’s just say we had some questions.
When I got home, my parents let me watch President Ronald Reagan speak to the nation from the Oval Office at three o’clock our time. I didn’t understand much of the speech, but I listened when it felt like he talked directly to me. “And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff,” he said. “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.”
The future belonged to the brave. When I went to bed, I prayed for all the astronauts. For Christa McAuliffe and her family. President Reagan had talked about their sacrifice, and in my five-year-old mind, I decided the best way to honor that was to take on Christa McAuliffe’s work and become an astronaut and teacher. Christa McAuliffe needed me to do it, and kids like me who had trouble following along in class needed a teacher who understood the way they learned.
I was so serious about becoming an astronaut after this tragedy that my parents let me attend space camp that summer. I was all in. They gave each of us a little NASA blue button-down shirt, so I was basically already an astronaut in my mind. They led us into the zero-gravity simulator, built to look like you were in a shuttle, and I took right to floating around, flying through the air just like I did in my dreams.