I’m wearing a black Lycra catsuit to the first ballet class I’ve attended in more than 15 years. The suit fits so poorly that the manufacturer I ordered it from has partially refunded my payment, which is lucky because we are broke and, ill-advisedly, I ordered two of them in a spur-of-the-moment flurry late at night. Now I’m wearing the terrible outfit because I don’t own anything else that works with my scars.
The ballet school is in the main street of town. I’ve googled their timetable several times over the years looking for classes suitable for my kids. I’ve looked for adult dance classes on occasion, but the combined logistics of limited income and the time demands of raising small children always conspired to put me off a thorough search.
I had prepared for the class with the understanding I would be attempting to move my body through humiliation, because this is what I am used to.Since having the children, growing larger and losing fitness, being cautious about my scars, losing faith in the ability of my body, I’ve become used to being underestimated – and in underestimating myself. But looking at these middle-aged women in their serious ballet uniforms, I suddenly feel that I am in the right place.
For some reason, the teacher positions me as her shadow. We stand side by side at the barre. I find myself lengthening, shifting my shoulders back. The huge floor-to-ceiling mirrors do not extend all the way to where I am standing, so I am blessed with blindness at this first class, having to rely on the shapes my body makes in the space, to my knowledge of form, deep-folded like veins of gold in rock, to determine whether I am creating the shapes as I should.
Unbelievably, I am finding the class almost easy even as I fumble the steps. I feel graceful. I feel a kind of potential I never felt as a young woman, as a child. How is this possible? But having forged a writing career and struggled in a very different but equally gruelling way to raise small children, allowing myself the privilege of attending the dance class to struggle and potentially fail was liberating.I came to the first class humbled by my shortcomings rather than eviscerated by my attempts to suppress them. I came with back pain from a jellied core, in possession of very little downtime, cracked open by the cataclysm of early parenthood.
Who prevented her freedom?
That dastardly childbirth
want to see me without a bra?