Family nostalgia project ‘10 continues and thankfully ends.

Tap shoes and the training potty at my abuelita’s house.

My entire family went on vacation when I was almost two and my mom didn’t want to deal with my hair since it was so hot out so she chopped it off and this is why I am ambiguously gendered in this photo with my grandpa.

This is newborn me. I was three weeks late and a monstrous baby at birth. I just typed “at bitch”. very telling.

I have no words for my father’s fashion choices.

I am going to flip furniture over Teresa Giudice/RHONJ-style, just wait.

My mom reading in the 70s. She commented: “You see, it wasn’t just glitter and cocaine. Not that I ever did cocaine. You know.” Note: she then married a man with the last name Escobar. I rest my case.

I’m surprised the Sartorialist didn’t come calling.

I don’t know either. Also, PUBLIX brand foil. Nice.

See my dad’s balding patch? Well, I learned how to crochet around age 5 and I made him a little pink yarmulke-looking thing so “no one would”. I’m pretty sure he cried.

my mom and dad (with my aunt!) before i was born.

You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

happy birthday, mama.

phone chats with my mother

(image via tonystarks)

my mom: i get the whole lady gaga thing. it’s like when you were little and madonna was making music videos they would only play at night on tv and i taught you how to vogue and i obviously didn’t let you look at her sex book because you were 5 or 6 but i remember thinking, “this is going to be something important for women and for art”.

me: you never said that specifically but i always got the feeling that’s what you were trying to tell me and that’s what lady gaga is now in my opinion.

my mom: also the hats, amazing! it’s like they let a drag queen direct the easter parade!

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.

The best Valentine’s Day of my life was the one when I was 6 and in kindergarten. I excitedly made a mailbox for my soon to be received valentines with the rest of my classmates, fashioning mine out of pink and red construction paper and using two small heart stickers to form the diaeresis over the i in my name. I went to the store with my mom and picked out perfect valentines, Batman ones, and I wrote each classmate’s name and a “heart, anaïs” in a 6-year-old scrawl on each one. I was ready for my first serious Valentine’s day celebration that Friday; my mom was even going to bring cupcakes for my class.

Then my stomach woke me up on Thursday morning. It felt twisted and crampy, and I walked slowly to my parents’ bedroom. My dad had already left that morning but my mom was still in bed, waking up slowly and watching the morning news. She saw me in the doorway and smiled. I threw up all over the carpet. I heard her inner “AHHH VOMIT” radar go off but she put me in a bath and cleaned me off and put me in clean pajamas and plopped me in her big bed with a tiny trashcan next to me in case I threw up again. She took my temperature and called my uncle the doctor to see what she should do; she came back from the kitchen with juice and medicine for my tummy and I looked up at her with my pale green face.

“I can go to school tomorrow though, right?” I asked, feeling my stomach rumble dangerously again.

My mom sighed and climbed into bed with me. We spent the day napping and watching tv. I threw up a few more times and she held my hair. I have to note that this is also how I spent my first year of college with my roommate. I fell asleep crossing my fingers that Friday would bring good health and valentines. I tried to get out of bed Friday morning but my mom was having none of it.

“Get back in bed now,” she said. She got this certain wrinkle in her forehead and I knew that meant business.

I wasn’t feeling any better on Friday and my occasional crying about not being able to go to school didn’t help me any. My mom dragged me out of bed only to take me to see my uncle who confirmed that it was just a short stomach bug and that I should be fine soon. I was still in my pajamas and I pouted in the car. I could feel my mom grow irritated.

“What’s wrong?” She looked at me for a second as she kept an eye on the road.

“Nothing,” I sniffled.

“Then why do you look like a soggy french fry?” She was trying not to smile.

“I DO NOT LOOK LIKE A SOGGY FRENCH FRY.” Getting upset tired me and I leaned my head against the car door. “I hate Valentine’s Day.”

“I never thought you’d say that this early,” she laughed. I pursed my lips at her.

“It’s not funny.”

“No, of course not.” She tried not to smile. “Do you want to go to Toys R’ Us?”

“Maybe.” I didn’t want to sound too excited. Even at 6, I knew that this was how to play this game.

“Okay.” She drove in whatever direction Toys R’ Us was; when you’re a child, you just seem to arrive places by magic, the code of street names and numbers seeming like a puzzle beyond your mind’s grasp.

She parked outside of the familiar large building with the giraffe on the front and picked me up out of my seat. She carried me inside and put me in a cart. We walked up and down every aisle, even the ones I wasn’t really interested in; today we would inspect every inch of the place. Eventually we made it up the Barbie aisle. I wasn’t a big fan of Barbies. My parents bought me the Dream House and also that weird mansion that folds in to a suitcase but it concerned me that Barbie dolls could only stand as if they were in ballet class. I mostly experimented with giving my dolls haircuts since those hairbrushes shaped like seashells didn’t do very well at getting knots out. There was nothing I wanted until I saw IT. The one thing my mom would never buy me because it was too expensive for a little girl who was just going to cut the hair off and accidentally feed the Barbie accessories to the family dog: the Midge Gets Married set.

I always liked Midge. Barbie was too popular and Skipper tried too hard and the one I looked the most like, Teresa, never got cool jobs. But Midge, I could get behind that. She looked like the Little Mermaid after all. She just seemed like she didn’t try too hard. I waved my little hands in front of me to stop my mom. She looked from the set to me and narrowed her eyes.

“No.”

“I can’t even go to school today! Everyone is having a good day without me and I don’t get any valentines and they’re all making heart shaped Jello jigglers and I don’t get anything and I don’t know why Midge can’t get married at our house!” I said this in one rapid breath and felt nauseated. I must have swayed a bit because my mom reached out to grab my shoulder.

She looked sort of guilty as she stared at me for a while. She reached out and grabbed the box from the shelf and handed it to me. I wanted to hug the shit out of it but I restrained myself since I was supposed to be a sick child. I hid my mouth behind the box and grinned like a fool. I gave it to the cashier to scan when we got to the register; she gave it directly back to me, instantly realizing that I did not need a bag. My mom paid and we left. In the car, she turned to me at a red light.

“If Daddy asks, that was ON SALE, okay? ON SALE.”

“Yep.” I couldn’t wait to tear into the box and put Midge’s lavender honeymoon jacket on her. Could. Not. Wait.

We got home and I ran excitedly into the house as we pulled into the garage. I wasn’t even trying to act extra sick anymore. My mom walked into the kitchen and I climbed back into her bed and tore that box apart. You know how rappers talk about tearing up certain genitalia areas of ladies? That’s the kind of attitude I had at opening this packaging. There was Midge and her husband and Barbie and some other dude and the little girl who was the flower girl and the ring bearer boy. Midge’s skirt came right off and revealed a tighter honeymoon skirt. See, Midge was resourceful, combining the two outfits so she could leave her wedding faster. Barbie wasn’t as smart.

My heart swelled with that joy that you got as a kid when you had something new, a kind of high that comes from figuring out something new. I got that way about books then as well; I still do. Even though I felt better, I was still not 100% and so I fell asleep amidst the sea of packaging and bouquets and cumberbunds (I don’t know why I undressed the guy dolls, there was never anything to find). I woke up to my mom’s hand on my forehead. She had cleaned up the remnants of the box and placed all the dolls at the foot of the bed. There was a plate on the nightstand next to me and it had Jello jigglers, not red and shaped like hearts but orange and shaped like Christmas trees.

“We only have Christmas cookie cutters,” she said in explanation. “And orange Jello.”

I reached out for one and my mom brought the plate around and got into bed with me. She turned on the tv and we ate orange Jello Christmas trees while watching something that I can’t even recall. I escaped that first year of school valentines and the awkwardness of getting a card or not getting a card and what it meant if someone got you candy but what if it was candy that wasn’t as good as what someone else got and even at 6 wondering what it meant when the boy who slept on the mat next to you during naptime gave you a valentine with the word “love” on it because, I mean, your mom and dad said that to each other and in movies people said that and then they kissed so did you have to kiss? I had no clue and I wouldn’t have to prematurely worry about that till the next year. For then there was just Jello, the certainty that Barbie would be the only one to catch Midge’s bouquet, and that my mom liked hanging out with me even when I puked in her bed.

A few days later though, I DID get my mailbox full of valentines and began the analysis of what each Michael Keaton Batman Returns valentine meant. “You make my heart race to the Batmobile, Valentine!” I know, Bradley G.

My parents met at my aunt’s wedding, that is, my dad’s little sister. Somehow because of family friends in common, my mom ended up being a bridesmaid because in the very late 1970s, there were still not so many Cuban families in South Florida and they all seemed to know each other, having fled in the 1960s on airplanes as opposed to the rafts now seen on tv, just before the Mariel boatlifts that brought a mass exodus of Cubans to the United States. My mom came to the United States from Cuba when she was little, four or five, with my grandparents and they settled in the middle of the country, Indiana, where they experienced their first winter in a non-tropical climate. My grandpa’s first job in this country was chopping logs in the snow. They grew used to the weather and made a home, falling in love with this new country they found themselves in. My dad was also born in Cuba but left as a child, growing up in Spain and for a while in Mexico. Somehow both of their families found themselves in Florida almost twenty years later, assimilated into middle class America and sharing similar histories. The world is small.

The wedding was at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. My dad, having been out of town for a while, was not a groomsman but he sat near the front of the hall during the ceremony. He told me that he noticed my mom when she stood at the altar during the ceremony but thought she was too young, 21 or so at the time (he was 30 or so). His eye kept drifting to her throughout the night as she danced with other men and laughed with her friends. The younger members of the reception drifted out towards the pool, including the bride and groom, and they drank more champagne on a balmy May night.

My mom told me she caught my dad looking at her and winked just before she jumped into the pool still in her bridesmaid dress. Some of the wedding party followed while the rest of them laughed and watched from the edge of the pool. My dad reached a hand out to help my mom out of the pool and lifted her out. He gave her his tuxedo jacket and they talked quietly as they went back inside. My grandma caught sight of my mom’s soaking wet dress and smeared makeup and fumed. My parents talked quietly at the edge of the dance floor, laughing at the puddle she was making with her wet dress. With her veil tipsily askew on her red-haired curls, my aunt tossed the bouquet and it landed in my mom’s hands without effort. They laughed about it awkwardly and too loudly, the way you do when you first meet someone. She left with flowers beginning to wilt, he left with her phone number.

They dated and got married a year and a half later. She now remembers that she was nursing a broken heart from her first love around that time and he recalls being charmed but unsure about commitment. They almost divorced a few years later, had their one child, me, and finally did divorce twenty years after meeting. They are still good friends and are remarried or involved with other people now. Both my mom and dad have told me my entire life, especially since they got divorced, to never settle for anyone less than who you are madly, passionately in love with, to live my life and go to college and know who I am and do the things I want to do and be independent but to never settle for anything other than that person who would kiss your spleen if he had the chance. They never loved each other like that.

But damn did they meet cute.

my mom in the 70s

mom & dad before their honeymoon. check out that beegees suit and that mustache.

my mom & my grandma at my mom’s first birthday party in havana, cuba, 1960

my mommy in mexico in 1979

my mom on her wedding day