The Gift of Peter – After I Almost Died

 

After I was so sick, and feeling so weak … the universe gave me a lovely gift of a gentle hearted man coming into my life, Peter.

I look at the amazing timing of all the things that happened that year in 1982 and can see that the universe had a plan in place to keep me going and to keep me sane.

The fall of 1981 into 1982 was extreme challenging because I was going to leave the Berlin Ballet and go to Ballet West in Salt Lake City, UT.

Contracts in Berlin require a year’s notice if one is leaving. So, in September of 1981 … I knew I was leaving and so did the company.

What ensued was a long story that I will tell at another time. But suffice it to say, the conflicts, challenges, and upsets were so severe that they were at the root of my getting pneumonia three times that winter and almost dying.

John and Ghissy saved me, but I did not realize how tenuous my hold on life was … at that time.
Clearly, the angels knew that I needed someone to care for me and to love me.

I had spent my entire adolescence never dating. Ballet was my lover. And it was a very jealous and demanding one. It did not allow me wiggle room to date or to have the bandwidth mentally to care for another. For me ballet took everything and all I had inside, daily.

In the Berlin Ballet, one of the male soloists would constantly tease me and say, “You know your skin will clear up … if you just started having sex!”
Such comments do not help when you are trying to adapt to a new culture and struggling to find ways through the daily challenges.

To say that I was a high strung, tightly wound, ballerina … is an understatement.

While I love dance with every fiber of my being, the emotional and mental toll it took because of my perfectionistic self was a heavy one.

Even now, I would not change anything. I would do it all again, because when we are young … we think we have endless amounts of energy and that if we just try hard enough that we will make it through.
But after being so ill, it was very hard to get my mojo back.

The Director, Gert Reinholm, was playing a game that I was in a contract dispute with the Berlin Ballet which was a lie. He decided that he would not release me from my contract at the end of the cycle. But I had a contract with Ballet West.
And I had to go.

The conflict had cost me tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and the issue was still not settled. I had done everything correctly, but he threw in some big lures and offered up things that I did not see coming to stay. In my shock at the offer, I hesitated. I needed to get insight from the other principal dancers … which they generously offered, and I decided to leave anyway.
I went back to Gert Reinholm and told him that I still wanted to leave.
I did not realize that my needing a moment to think things through … placed me in a grey area where now he believed that I would have to stay two years to be released instead of one.

It was a manipulative and unfair game that those in power use to control dancers’ lives.

The stress (literally) nearly killed me because I kept trying to be nice. But I was learning that just because I am nice that does not mean that all the rest of those in the world are nice. And I came to the hard understanding that I did not really know most people.
So I am in a place where I am weak and vulnerable, exhausted and alone. When in comes Peter.

We met through mutual friends and he was instantly attracted to me.

Quite a new experience for me.

I tended to be the person that men came up to and said, “Suzanne what can to do to date that other girl over there!”

I was always a friendly and approachable person but rarely did anyone come towards me. I was as if I walked in a bubble that most would not attempt to step into.

For my whole life that had felt fine … simpler … less complicated!
Then Peter shows up.

He was in school for finance. He parents owned hotels in Flensburg, Germany. It was a coastal town just at the edge of the border of Denmark.

He clearly had money, he had a very fast, BMW. And he was shockingly interested in me!

His presence gave a glimmer of hope to a young woman, feeling as if they world was against her in all areas. But his attraction and attention were … complicating.

I told him right off the bat that I was leaving. I told him the whole story of the contract dispute and that I had a contract in Utah. I told him I was desperate to go home to the US.

I tried to make things clear that Ballet was my passion and my life and that nothing and no one was going to get in that way of that.
He seemed (at first) fine with that. He was in school. He still had a long way to go. And he was not ready to settle down.

Or so he said.

We began a lovely courting that made me feel special as he was a gentleman and not being pushing around the sex stuff.

That clearly gave me exactly what I needed to feel my way slowly into the dance of becoming a grown-up woman and a woman that got to decide what she wanted without the social pressures that unfairly push so many towards things that they are not really prepared for.

We had a ton of fun. He had those spinning kites, and we would go out and fly kites in the strong wind of Berlin in the parks. He had that fast car, and we would drive it up and down the autobahn at the top speed limit in Germany which was 130 kilometers per hour which was about 80 miles an hour.
While neither he or I had a ton of money we had enough to go out to dinner and also travel to see his parents in Flensburg.

While in Flensburg I would take off my shoes and dance on the tops of the dikes in my muddy feet and we would walk through fields of Hops and laugh, holding hands.
He arrived at a time where I needed a mental break from what had been happening. He was kind and considerate. He was thoughtful and caring.

And for a first time lover, he was everything a young woman could ask for.

~Suzanne Wagner~