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In the Christian season of Epiphany the three wise men are prompted to seek the Christ Child by an angel’s message.  Their path is lit by a star in the sky.

You know what I’m thinking in January of 2010?  I wish I had a star in the sky and all I had to do was follow it and be led to inspiration beyond all imagining.

Regardless of your particular belief system, I think we can all agree that January evokes a season of looking inward, of retreating to the self to re-evaluate goals for the coming year.

My own New Year’s was much different from last year, when I was surrounded by friends, laughter and a sense of absolute joy.  This year I watched the ball drop in Time’s Square, feverishly curled up in a blanket on my couch and quite alone.

What will 2010 bring?  More importantly, what will I do to reinvent myself this year?  I have already made the countless lists and broken the many resolutions, all the while furiously scolding myself for not having a stronger will, a deeper sense of self, and a clear idea of career.

My interview this month reminded me that it’s not all up to me.  The universe has something to do with it.  For me, God has something to do with it.  Sometime in 2009 I lost trust in the belief I held as a little girl – that God would help steer me in the right direction, as long as I kept stepping forward.

“I collected all these foreign words, and I remember the summers, sitting on our front steps that faced west, and watching the sunsets, and I just planned my life – I was going to travel and speak foreign languages.”
I share with you my interview with Juanzetta Flowers -- career nurse, lifelong learner, travel enthusiast, and animal lover -- because her story is an inspiration and reminder to those of us self-centered enough to think we’re on our own.  The conviction I took with me after visiting Juanzetta in her Southside condo was this: be yourself, recognize opportunity when it’s shaking your hand, and trust that the universe will send some help – be it with a guiding star, or, as in Dr. Flowers’ story, an angel disguised as her college roommate.

Juanzetta Flowers grew up in Gadsden, Alabama in the 1940s and 50s.  “I always said it was a good place to be from,” she quips with a laugh.  “Far from.”  It’s easy to sympathize with this viewpoint when you hear what she was like growing up -- while other little girls played with dolls and modeled motherly roles in their imaginative play, Juanzetta and her friends played “three girls working and living in an apartment.” At age five she fell in love with foreign languages when missionaries came to speak at her church.  This was also when she knew that she didn’t want to live in Gadsden any longer than she had to.  “I collected all these foreign words, and I remember the summers, sitting on our front steps that faced west, and watching the sunsets, and I just planned my life – I was going to travel and speak foreign languages.”

After hearing her 1st grade teacher talk about which college she had attended, Juanzetta came home and announced to her family that she would be attending college, too. She would end up being the only one of her siblings to earn a Bachelor’s Degree.  “My husband Charlie used to say that I raised the average education of my family because I got a degree for all of us – one baccalaureate, two masters, and one doctorate degree.”

Upon graduating high school in 1959, she applied to Montevallo’s language program and was granted early acceptance.  Her dream of working in the UN as an interpreter was on its way to being realized… until the morning of her first day of class.  Her father refused to drive her to Montevallo.  It was especially crushing for Juanzetta because she had always felt more supported by and close to her father than to any other family member. “My mother and I always drove each other crazy; Daddy kept me sane.  But in the end, he could not get past his notion that women needed men to take care of them – he was born in 1903, so he was a Victorian.  And here I was growing up and saying I’m not going to get married and I’m not going to have children because then I’ll be stuck.”

After several months of deep depression, pouring herself into books and isolating herself from her family, her mother came to her with a solution – she could cash in her life insurance policy and enroll at Jacksonville State, which was close by and would allow her to come home on weekends.

It was at Jacksonville State that she met her guiding star, “angel” and college roommate Ann Ford.  The two quickly became good friends.  “My roommate bugged me so much to go to nursing school – she would wake me up to tell me I had to go.  To get her to shut up,” she recalls with a laugh, “I took a bus to Birmingham for "...looking back on it, I think that the universe must have been despairing before I took that test, thinking ‘What are we going to do to get her in the right direction?’"the entrance test; I did great on English, Logic, and Natural Science, but I got to math and just closed the book, took out the answer sheet and just made a lovely pattern to fill in the bubbles.”

Two weeks later she received the acceptance letter to the diploma program at the Birmingham Baptist School of Nursing.  (And a 97% passing grade on the Math section alone.  Note to self: never leave a multiple choice test blank!)  “I got to nursing school and I loved every minute of it.  It launched me.  You know, years later, looking back on it, I think that the universe must have been despairing before I took that test, thinking ‘What are we going to do to get her in the right direction?’  So they put this little nag there -- Ann Ford.”

And the rest is herstory.

In 2005 Juanzetta Flowers was inducted into The Alabama Nursing Hall of Fame, an honor she received as one of the state’s first nurse practitioners.  In the 1970s Alabama led the country in the number of deaths due to cervical cancer.  “Women weren’t coming in to be examined until it was too late.  So this pilot program was started and a few of us were taught how to do pelvic exams and pap smears, and then we went and trained public health nurses how to do them.”  The program was so successful that in the fourth year of its establishment, Alabama was knocked down the list.  In fact, that year Alabama turned up 50th -- it was absolute last in the number of deaths due to cervical cancer.  “It was the most phenomenal thing I’ve ever participated in,” she adds.  “And I was just having a really wonderful time – I was just doing what I thought I should be doing.”

Juanzetta’s decision to continue her career at UAB would afford her opportunities to advance and innovate the field of women’s health.  Over the years she was presented with a vast array of opportunities.  Her philosophy of not only taking those opportunities seriously, but saying “yes,” would shape her life in ways she could have never imagined.  “I guess it’s true for any life,” she says carefully, “but there’s no way I could’ve planned my life because most of the things I’ve ended up doing I never anticipated.  But I was never shy about being willing to try – I just showed up and said yes, which I think is a loose cannon (laughs), but I definitely did that. And it rewarded me with a fabulous life and a really marvelous career.”

A marvelous career indeed.  In the 70s, she co-taught classes on sexuality, “because no one else wanted to go around doing that;” she secured her first Masters Degree in counseling; she discovered the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and began a lifelong pursuit of “forging my own theology and coming to grips with what I believe and the way I want to live my life;” and she helped establish a collaborating center for the World Health Organization at UAB that worked to improve the nursing profession in Alabama.

From 1989-90 she was president of the Foundation for Women’s Health in Alabama, whose purpose was to improve women’s health care by convincing UAB to dedicate a hospital to women and infants.  “Our premise was, if a hospital (say, UAB) takes care of the woman – if UAB can make her feel comfortable and give her a safe place to bring her infant – that mother is going to see that the rest of her family also comes to UAB.”  When Brookwood opened its facility, Juanzetta attests, “…it spawned other women’s and infants’ hospitals -- or, hospital wings dedicated to women and infants -- throughout Alabama.”  UAB meanwhile could never see their way to free up the money – until now.  “Somewhere, Charlie is grinning from ear to ear because the job we tried to get done thirty years ago is finally here.  I got to tour it last fall and it’s going to be fabulous.”

*Dr. Charles Flowers, Juanzetta’s husband, was Chair of UAB’s OB/GYN program from 1969-1985.  When he passed away in 1999, he left a legacy which changed the face of OB/GYN in Alabama.  Says Juanzetta, “Charlie was a feminist from the day he was born.”  His own mother had been a nurse anesthetist in 1911, and with an incredibly strong role model to guide his upbringing, it wasn’t a surprise to hear her say of him, “He truly had a respect and deep love for women and their logic.  He drummed into his residents the notion that if you listen to your patient, she will tell you what she needs.  And if she doesn’t, then it’s your fault; not hers.  And they changed the state of Alabama – we went from being a state where women were considered idiots, to one where they are considered copartners with their doctors in planning their health.  It’s a marvelous thing to see that.”

Juanzetta’s partnership with her husband afforded her not only an inspired career, but also an adventurous life.  She and Charlie traveled around the world, visiting over 50 countries together.  Her passion and awe for the natural world pours out when she talks about visiting the Galapagos Islands in 1987.  “That truly was amazing to see those animals with no fear of humans.  And overnight Mother Nature would wash away all the footprints.  So every morning (Charlie and I were always first on the beach), it was like being present at creation. It was so spectacular you lost your breath every day.”

When I ask her the requisite, “Do you consider yourself a feminist” question, we both laugh and she answers, “I think I was born one, don’t you?”

And it is this response that sticks with me and that I hold close when I’m pondering where I should go next, or what I should pursue.  “Who was I born to be?”  It’s a question that might be more easily answered than we think.  We only have to find that star above Bethlehem.  For Juanzetta, her dreams of travel to foreign lands were indeed fulfilled, but the Universe had to rig some answer keys, throw in an angel disguised as a nagging roommate, and add some career She had just awakened, and turned to her husband and said, “Darling, I think you need to know that as of today, I’m not going to care what the neighbors think anymore.”  Reliving the moment Juanzetta Flowers laughs and says, “And I’ll never forget it -- he looked at me with this fabulous expression and he said, ‘I didn’t know you did!’”doors for one determined woman to open.  How often do we say no to opportunities?  How often do we ignore those nagging angels?  How many times do we look upward and get disappointed by clouds and forever after keep our eyes trained on the ground?

Even Juanzetta Flowers, strong-willed and intelligent, knowledge-seeking and energetic, has speed bumps.  It’s only slightly surprising to hear that she struggled for years with the bane of many Southern women’s existence: social acceptance.  But even those clouds passed, she told me, on the morning of her 40th birthday.  She had just awakened, and turned to her husband and said, “Darling, I think you need to know that as of today, I’m not going to care what the neighbors think anymore.”  Reliving the moment Juanzetta Flowers laughs and says, “And I’ll never forget it -- he looked at me with this fabulous expression and he said, ‘I didn’t know you did!’”

Juanzetta’s story is a testament to stepping forward, trusting that any doubts of self will be confronted and healed, when the time is right – be it on the morning of your 40th birthday or on the eve of a new year.

As she says so succinctly, “I think life is an adventure, and if you say yes, the adventures keep coming.”

*Charles E. Flowers, published A Woman Talks With Her Doctor in 1979.

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