Gentle reader,
(This one’s for my dance mom friends; if you happen to read this, I hope you’ll take it as the love letter it is. Love is messy!)
I’m just back from five days in the Wisconsin Dells, for my daughter’s dance competition. I never thought I’d write that sentence, but, as it turns out, I’m a dance mom…
I imagine this piece can be of no interest to you unless I can summon the courage for the kind of honesty that pulls off a layer of skin. But I already know I’m not going to tell you how much we spend on dance, an amount we can’t afford and which, frankly, I’d find immoral even if we could. But we do it anyway. We will do it anyway. This, I think, is one of the ways sin works, preying on us by wrapping itself up with our locatedness and our loves.
(PSA for parents of young children: the price for youth activities functions on the principle of the frog in the pot of warm water, who doesn’t realize the temperature is going up until it boils to death. You may want to take heed and hop out while you still can.)
But the dance thing can be so beautiful:
the cathedral line of a leg extended to the sky, toe pointed, just so,
the hours of discipline to train the human body, the human being, the analogy between discipline and discipleship,
and the way those little girls look up at the big ones, who’ve become the girls they want to be.
And sometimes I love the delicious audacity of pouring so much into something so very few men care about, something that suggests that girl-bodies might have a purpose beyond the capitalist-patriarchal telos of consuming and being consumed.
I spot a dad sitting on the floor, glued to his phone. His T-shirt reads, “I don’t dance, I finance.”
I’ve never been in a more feminine identified space than a dance competition, and that statement includes sorority rush and bridal boutiques. Though pronoun stickers are available with alternatives, the place is full of shes and hers, and the cultural markers for those shes are mostly not subversive. Everything happens in a whirlwind of ribbons and a cloud of glitter and hairspray.
And who can perform femininity these days without…well…performing it?
How can that feeling not be heightened by the fact that a dance competition is a performance? And all that femininity can only be a performed in a patriarchal world, which corsets and despises the feminine. So, the performance space can only be fraught. Will it respond by going all-in, the tutus pink and the smiles unyielding? Will it poke at the thing, just a little, with an edgier costume and a wink?
I don’t know if it’s the glitter or the patriarchy that’s making me so darned itchy.
Hence comes part of my ambivalence about being a dance mom. Here is femininity writ staged, femininity mocked in bad reality shows, femininity being judged by a panel set up in front of my daughter’s vulnerable girl body.
The presence of the very few dance men highlights the extraordinary female-identified-ness of the thing. When they move through the rooms, they cut the clouds of hairspray with the frisson attached to their male presence. These men may be subverting masculinity by being here, but they’re men, and we love them for it.
To each beautiful young man, a gaggle of feathered danclings, their faces daisies to his sun.
And then, at the yearly recital, witness the daddy-daughter dance. The crowd whoops and cheers when the dads take the stage. We love the incongruity: those dads stepping into this female space for love. Hashtag #girldad; know what I mean? The dads perform sheepishness with their turns and pliés, knowing that masculinity in feminine space requires it.
Dance momming involves several weekend long competitions each season.
(“Oh,” says my 22-year-old self, peering judgmentally into my fry-strewn minivan and raising a critical eyebrow. “I would never let my kids skip church for a sport. You’ve got to draw lines.”)
Oh, the lines we cross for love.
What does our team bring to a competition?
A studio director, with her family.
Three or four other dance teachers and choreographers, one the beloved man.
A mom or a grandma for each girl.
(Dads might make cameos at a competition, but this is mom-space. Men can’t go into that smelly, glittered dressing room, where the moms of the littler dancers are wrestling their kids in and out of tights, and the moms of the girls who can dress themselves are texting or ordering Doordash. It’s the moms who are putting in the fifteen-hour-days, their girls yelling at them about painful bobby-pins and hair-not-smoothed-just-right. It’s the moms who relax into mixed drinks in the hotel bar at an exhausted 9pm.)
We bring at least 340 pairs of dance shoes and 500 costumes.
136 eyes rimmed in black.
Over 13000 false lashes glued to those eyes, even the eyes of the kindergartners.
All of this goes into a bag big enough to hold my daughter’s body.
We bring 150 entries, including solos, duets, small groups, large groups, and one massive production piece, which includes every dancer in the company, from the star teenage twirlers to the smallest girls, who would normally be in bed.
I bring my fear. How will I manage this? I fear that I’m heading to my personal Degas-ian nightmare, staged in a suburban high school, taco truck at the curb.
Oh, the fears we drag along with our loves.
Three Studies of a Dancer in Fourth Position, 1879/80, Edgar Degas, via the Art Institute of Chicago
I never remember that I meant to bring ear plugs. Not, at least, until the speakers get roaring and my watch gives me a decibels warning.
The moms put together a lovely goody bag for our dancers.
I totally forget to make a contribution.
“Those were really nice bags the moms gave us,” says my daughter.
“I’m glad you liked them,” says me.
“What did you put in?”
Oh, how I fear my daugther’s judgement. Will she equate my lapse with a lack of love? Will she know I’m the wrong kind of mom?
Instead, I get a moment of mom-grace. She gives me a smile and a teasing voice, “OOOOhhhh,” she says. “I bet you’re in trouble with Jenny Myers.”1
“Who’s Jenny Myers?”
“Like, the main dance mom.”
“Actually,” I say, “the moms were super nice about it.”
They were.
“We’re here for each other,” they said.
Still, I’m an introvert. A hobbit. I know the other moms won’t like me. What will we talk about? Will they judge my inept execution of the team’s hair-style, even though I studied the YouTube tutorial like a good dance mom?
Surely they’ll be judging my inept performances of femininity and of momming.
But the other moms are just women like me. When they turn out to be kind and lovely and human, inviting me for a drink and rooting for my girl, I wonder if my fear wasn’t just more misogyny.
Me, trying to place myself outside the realm of that mockable category, the dance-mom. Me, holding myself aloof from the humanity, the feminine-identified, the love…
Oh, the sins we cover with our fear.
When it’s time for awards, the stage transforms into a combination of a club—too-fashion-forward-for-the- Midwest—and a locker room. Music blares, and the competitors sit on the floor, clustered with their teammates, having shed their sequins for flannel pants or leggings. The competition’s beautiful young staff stalk the stage in leather pants and silk shirts, furry thigh high boots, dresses cut in a v to the belly button. In the audience, the tired moms wear our dance team sweatshirts with joggers or jeans.
No bronze, silver, and gold will be awarded here. The awards are cryptic, designed to confuse, as if we could fail to notice who wins top honors and who ekes by, as if a segment of moms aren’t going through their lists with a pen, marking down every score. A piece might receive a double ruby, a platinum laurel or a high platinum triple pirouette crown. The named honors differ at every competition; the fragile hopes do not.
Yellow Dancers (In the Wings), 1874/76, Edgar Degas, via the Art Insittute of Chicago
The floor is strewn with hairpins, sequins, candy wrappers, and the bleeding hearts of our daughters.
And, here I am, pretending to be more comfortable with being female than are the tweens, holding myself aloof from the prodigal investment of time and money and care, as though love weren’t ridiculously prodigal. Here I am, trying to twist metaphors out of the thing.
But, for my daughter, it’s not a metaphor. It’s her reality, her body.
It’s her tight shoulders, her tired toes, and her bruised knee.
It’s a thing she loves and a thing that—sometimes—sees her transfigured.
Which is why I kind of love this thing I sort of hate.
And, also for my daughter—sometimes—it’s a thing that breaks her heart.
Which—let’s be real—is probably the fiercest reason I hate the thing anyway.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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Names changed to protect the innocent.
Beautiful.