gotta dance! or how you survive a childhood of ballet with the ultimate stage mom

When I was 2, I still wore diapers sometimes but my mom decided it was time for me to follow in her footsteps and go to ballet class. She justified this to my father by saying that it would be good for my tiny developing flat feet (I no longer have flat feet; thanks, ballet!). So I went to my first class which was mostly comprised of wobbly pliés and bouncing to the peanut, peanut butter and JELLY song. In the beginning, it was once a week, always on Thursdays, and I would get a Happy Meal directly after class. My mom never allowed Happy Meals but my dad would pick me up and break the rules. Always a cheeseburger meal with HI-C orange drink. He would help me remove all the pickles and watched as I ate the processed food my mom never let me have. He didn’t say I love you often but this time together said it all. This set the standard for the way my dad and I enjoy eating together to this day.

One Thursday when I was perhaps 3, my dad picked me up from preschool, my ballet clothes and bag in his car all ready for class. I took one look at him with a trembling bottom lip.

“I don’t want to go today,” I said with a shaky voice. Done.

He didn’t mind in the least and we went home. We sat on the couch together and watched tv for about 30 minutes when my mom walked in. She had a bag of groceries in her arms and she looked at the two of us, shocked.

“Why isn’t she at ballet class?” Her eyes were huge and terrifying.

“She didn’t feel like going so we stayed home today,” my dad replied, his arm around me. “I called and let them know she wouldn’t be there today.”

“Oh no, she’s going,” she said, picking up my ballet bag from the spot my dad had placed it when we walked in and holding it out to me. “She’s just trying to test her limits with you. Come on, Anaïs.”

I didn’t move. I really didn’t want to go. I was terrified of my mom at that moment but I didn’t budge. She finally came over and pulled me off the couch and got me dressed right there. I cried the entire time as she rolled tights over my chubby babyish legs and pulled my hair into a tight ponytail. She grabbed my hand and made her way out the door, dragging me the entire way.

“Why are you doing this?” My dad followed us out to the car. “The class is almost over.”

“It’s the principle of the thing, she can’t have her way whenever she wants it.” She put me in my car seat, put the car in drive, and reversed out of the driveway, my dad watching in horror.

She drove me to the dance studio and pushed me into the last 20 minutes of the class. I stood in my tiny ballet shoes and cried and cried. The other girls looked confused. I didn’t dance until I saw my mom standing at the window giving me a look that said so much. I joined the rest of the class and looked straight ahead at the mirror as I copied the teacher’s movements, aware of my mom’s eyes locked on me. This would be my daily life for the next thirteen years of my life.

We got into the car after class and she drove to McDonald’s. She got me a Happy Meal and we sat inside as I ate it in between sniffles. She looked at me thoughtfully.

“Don’t tell your dad I got you this,” she said to which I nodded. “I only do the things I do because I love you, you know.”

I dipped a fry in sweet and sour sauce and wondered what love even meant and how to feel it when the people who said it treated me so differently. Every Thursday though, there was a Happy Meal.

Pretty soon, there were no Happy Meals. One toddler ballet class became three and then five classes, ballet, jazz, tap. Then lyrical, sometimes modern dance. A conditioning class, then the early days of pointe classes. By ten, I danced every day unless I was dying of some illness and my mom never thought I was sick enough to not go to class. She picked me up from school every day and I changed in the backseat, out of my plaid Catholic school jumper into pink tights, black leotard, and a wrap skirt. I learned by age 7 to pull my thick hair into a bun, coiling it into place with bobby pins, securing it with a hairnet, finishing it with flowers and a shiny layer of hair spray. My mom and I ate out every day before class, different restaurants, and I always ate a salad. Class started at 4:30 and blended into rehearsals afterward. I did my homework in between routines, figuring out math problems or answering history questions while watching the pas de deux from Swan Lake or perhaps, the battle scene from the Nutcracker. I danced until 10pm usually and then went home to stand in a hot shower for 30 minutes, my toes bleeding, my muscles sore. I went to bed and I fell asleep quickly. It all began again at 6:30 the next morning.

I want to say it was terrible and in some respects, it was, but it was also fun. I have two words for you: dance competition.

Anyone who has ever been in a dance competition knows those names. Headliners, Showstopper, Starpower, Tremaine. If you were a competitive dancer, you knew these names. You knew exactly when they’d be happening that year and you knew that if someone in your family was getting married on one of those fateful weekends, you would not be their flower girl. I trained all year, beginning in June. Two solos, sometimes three, depending on the category, but I always did song & dance and lyrical, with ballet thrown in some years. The solos would be choreographed by one of your instructors and you would have private lessons where you would learn the routine and practice several times a week. They would tell you where you were weak. I had to learn to jump higher, to not be afraid to throw my entire body into it, to jump the same way I turned, excellently, fouette after fouette. In the middle of July, my mom would rehearse with me in the backyard, yelling at me to leap and practice jumping into the pool so as not to be afraid of the landing. I splashed again and again into the pool, chlorinated water dripping off my tiny shoulders as my mom watched intensely. In case it wasn’t obvious by now, she’s a former dancer.

Not only did you have to perfect your solos and worry about yourself but in a dance company, you had group numbers. Duets, trios, small groups, line, and production numbers, usually about 7 other routines that you had to keep in your head and learn marks for. We rehearsed all the time. We were all friends with each other because we spent all of our time together. It was gossipy and catty but it was better to suck it up and be best friends 4 lyfe (LYLAS!) than to have no one; otherwise, it was just you and your mom. You don’t think about it until later but you’re a kid and you’re rehearsing late into the night, the whole weekend, one day off per week, maybe. I rarely saw my dad as a kid, not because I didn’t want to but because I was so damn busy, busier than him who had his own business.

“You can stop whenever you like, Anaïs,” my mom would say when I’d complain about the hours. “I’m not forcing you to do this.”

That, of course, was untrue, and even if it wasn’t, how could you disappoint your parent when he or she wants something so much? Even as a kid, you know that you shouldn’t be doing this but no one sincerely tells you it’s okay to stop, that it’s okay to just be. And so you dance.

Actual dance competitions are pretty much like the beauty pageants you see on tv. My mom and I would get up at 5 am usually because dance competitions began early on a Friday or Saturday morning. I hate waking up early now just as I did then. I’d put on my tights and leotard and warm up clothes and sit on the couch while my mom put my makeup on me. This was not normal people makeup, this was stage makeup. Imagine a 7 year old with an entire layer of pancake foundation, powder on top of it, blush, three eyeshadow colors blended to perfection, brow highlighter, thick black eyeliner, fake eyelashes plus mascara, lipliner, and then the lipstick. By the time I was in the third grade, I could have gotten RuPaul ready for a night out. It was never fun but it got easier over time. There was only that one time that my mom had to literally sit on me to put eyeliner on me.

“I swear to God if you don’t stop moving, you’re going to be the only 6-year-old girl with an eyepatch, Anaïs Marie, I swear it,” she warned. The thought kept me still as my big eyes became rimmed with kohl.

Costumes and their matching shoes went into individual garment bags and Ziploc baggies. Every accessory was labeled and ready. We set up camp in the dressing room backstage with the rest of the girls from my dance studio and got dressed finally before warming up. Lipstick was the last thing to go on because even the most dainty little girl will fuck this up without a doubt. Our studio had a color to go with different costumes/styles of dance.

The one used most often was True Mauve by Revlon. All the lipsticks were Revlon actually so that every mom could buy the same color because God forbid some 9-year-old’s lipstick not match the other 25 girls on stage. Most often seen in lyrical or ballet routines.

True Red, which made me look like a child prostitute, was for the sassier routines. Often seen in tap numbers.

And of course, Wild Orchid. This was wild indeed and my favorite of the bunch. It made me look like I’d been making out with the actual Barbie Dream House. This was for jazz and the occasional hip hop routines that tiny suburban girls were apt to do (we were all over Big Willie Style for the record).

My mom shellacked my lips in waxy color and I was ready to go. She called me Fishlips my entire childhood but I got my revenge when I grew into much fuller lips than she ever had; she’s still bitter and calls me Fishlips.

Then it was time for warm up. I went backstage and got ready for whichever solo was first, usually song and dance. I also took singing lessons my entire childhood but those were enjoyable and a sanctuary from the hours of dance. I had my own mic system and my mom had already dropped off the receiver and so I stretched backstage with a headset on. I had already memorized my number and when it came to call my name, the announcer usually pronounced it wrong, no matter how stern my mom had been in explaining it earlier. I smoothed my hair and walked onto stage.

It was three minutes of being on. No mistakes now. I sang and danced and I sold it because that’s what you do when you get on stage, you sell yourself and I was an excellent showman. I hit every mark, made every turn, and performed as if I were the most irresistible creature known to man. I never believed but on stage was the closest I felt to that for a long time. It wasn’t until I was 21, 22 that I felt this way in my normal life and now I walk down the street with the same spring in my step that I used to reserve for grapevines and time steps.

The air was always so cold on stage, the air conditioning blasting you, and in hindsight, it makes sense. Putting yourself on stage to be literally judged by the three people sitting at the table right in front of you is terrifying and cold, at any age, but as a kid? I look back and wonder how the hell I was brave enough to basically throw myself to the wolves. Maybe I didn’t think about it then the way I do now but damn. Balls, kid.

The music faded out and I was done. I took a bow and stage walked (yes, stage walked) with that fake smile that had begun to look real until I hit the wings. It’s over. Now I just had to repeat this about nine more times that weekend and it’d be over.

My mom always watched from the wings. She was forever my toughest critic but whenever I got off stage, she always hugged me fiercely and told me how proud she was. I tried not to tear up against her chest, knowing my eyeliner would be ruined, but that was the small moment that made me believe that all of this made sense, that all of the long hours and bleeding toes and strained Achilles’ tendons were worth it, for this moment. For a while, it was.

I was a good dancer and I won, a lot, actually. This was my life until I was 15, when my parents were divorcing and suddenly, dancing or anything else I did, straight A’s, student government, it wasn’t enough to keep my mom happy or to keep anything together. She turned to me one day in the shoe department at Nordstrom.

“Do you want to dance anymore?” She handed me a yellow kitten heel as she spoke. It was the first time in my life she had asked me what I wanted to do.

“No, not really,” I said, shocked.

“Okay.” She asked for the kitten heel in her size and in mine.

I was free. I felt a relief, knowing I would no longer have to miss time with my friends or skip tv shows or feel like throwing up my dinner when my Russian ballet instructor told me my newly burgeoning hips were too wide, but I knew that she didn’t actually care if I was happy or not, she was just finding new things to focus on post-divorce. She bought me those shoes and I never wore them.

I spent years thinking about my childhood, wondering if I would have been happier playing softball or just being lazy at home after school. I wondered what it would have been like to have more time with my dad (something I’m making up for now) or to have a mom who demanded nothing more than my existence on this earth to make her happy. I wondered what would have happened if I kept dancing into adulthood, pursued it as a career. I wondered how you ever knew what the right decision was and I realized that my mom hadn’t known either. I am the sum of that childhood, I am secret Happy Meals and pink tights with the seam in the back and bleeding, blistered toes and the awkward teenage body forced to be graceful and my mother’s eyes on my back as I pointed my toes as hard as I could, manipulating my body into the perfect vessel for my mom’s love and acceptance. In the end, I’m all that and none of that. I am all the things I have left behind as well as the new things I absorb every day. I stopped looking for anyone’s acceptance but my own and realized I never even had to look so far for that and so much more.

Two years ago, I danced for the first time since I was 15. I took a ballet class at the gym and I stood nervously at the barre, my body no longer as taut as it once was. The music began and I went through the motions, remembering each one perfectly. I was rusty. I felt the muscles pull in my back as I held an arabesque and I looked in the mirror, shoulders back, collarbones showing, legs now wobbly, and I felt whole. By the end of class, I lined up with the other girls for a leap combination, and despite the years that had passed and the wear on my body, I have never jumped as high or as joyfully as I did that day.