Dance Mom (Part 2: I Take It Back)
Maybe—and this unfortunately means accepting that past me was a snobby bitch—maybe being a Dance Mom has changed me. For good.
It’s 6:30 a.m. in a hotel bathroom. My 7-year-old is sitting on a chair that I’ve dragged in from the room and my mouth is full of bobby pins. By now I’ve got it down to a 20-minute science, this ritual of putting on her wig: one section of hair in the front, one on top, two in the back, put the donut on top, roll the front, pin pin pin, shove in the wig combs (while she cry cry cries), pin pin pin, fluff fluff fluff. Her little sister is still asleep and in a few minutes we’ll forget to even brush her hair as we hurry out the door. We’ll spend 17 hours at the competition venue that day and finally fall into bed at 1 a.m. Life, as they say, sure comes at you fast.
I wrote my first essay in this…series (?)..., Dance Mom Part 1, two years ago in a state of incredulous shock: at some point in the future, my precious little dancer will have to tan her legs and wear a wig?? No thank you!! I’m out. In fact, I’m so out that I will spend the next 5 paragraphs dunking on this sport and all its trappings….. Hahaha. Haha. Guess what: the future is here. When I said I didn’t want to drink the Koolaid—well, I’m swimming in it now, baby! The water’s fine!
Yes, I still have a laundry list of rants to write about Irish Dance. While I have you, let’s quickly run through the top three:
First and foremost: why are girls required to, basically, gym-tan-laundry this sport, while boys throw on a vest and call it a day? (That’s a rhetorical question that I know the answer to, and it rhymes with crapitalism and the fartriarchy.)
Also: where is my money going? Truly—the amount of money I’ve spent on this activity is so shocking that it will remain a mystery until I’m in bankruptcy court.
And finally: I was at this most recent regional competition until 12:30 a.m. on a school night. With my 7- and 5-year-olds. Can we please find another group of people to set the schedule and keep us on track, because—and I’m saying this with love and compassion as an Irish person—it’s clear that this is not our strength. Can we get some no-nonsense Scandinavians in here?
I will continue to ponder these questions in the silence of my heart. Someday I’ll write about them. But first, I’d like to take a detour. I’d like to simply enjoy something for once in my goddamn life without getting caught up in complexity.
It would take about six months, a few crying jags, multiple group text threads, and many many Google docs for me to fully explain the ins and outs of our current level of Irish Dance (that level being—full immersion; Why You So Obsessed With Me; the Extinction Method; steam sauna followed immediately by cold plunge). So I won’t try. But boy, do I want to, because here’s where I find myself: wanting to talk only about Irish Dance. Why you so obsessed with me, indeed.
Maybe that’s a side effect of recently spending the better part of 72 hours at that regional competition so ~locked in~ on dance logistics that I barely checked my phone and didn’t eat a single full meal. Or maybe—and this unfortunately means accepting that past me was a snobby bitch—maybe being a Dance Mom has changed me. For good.
If Past Me had been hovering above Current Me at that dance competition, she would have judged me so hard. She would have scoffed as I meticulously wrapped white and then black tape around my daughter’s shoes to create the illusion that her legs were longer. She would have rolled her eyes back into her head as I rinsed my daughter’s legs off in the shower, her orange spray-tan turning the water brown.
But Current Me had trained for this and she didn’t have time for any bullshit. The dance bag was organized within an inch of its life. The schedule was typed up, shared with grandparents, and printed out in triplicate. Everything was labeled. I was about to ford a river of Koolaid and I couldn’t waste energy judging myself or anyone else.
Can I be serious for one second, and can you ignore what I said up there about avoiding complexity? This is not an essay about Irish Dance. This is an essay about how hard it is to change, and how painful it is to engage with your unchanged former self.
The problem with writing is always having a record of how wrong / blind / dumb / stuck / pick-an-adjective I was at any given moment; I’ve ripped up so many old journals out of sheer embarrassment. The problem with writing on the internet is that I can’t rip it up.
Reading Dance Mom now reminds me of the practice nights I spent with my head in my computer, writing or working, instead of pulling my chair into the circle of moms and learning their kids’ names. It was much easier to judge those moms as an outsider instead of doing the actually scary thing, which was to walk up to them and say Hi. I don’t know what I’m doing here and I don’t understand anything. Can I join you? Over the competition weekend and the months leading up to it, those dance moms were my lifeblood. This essay is as much a love letter to them as it is an indictment of my past self.
The price of joining that metaphorical circle of chairs—the price of being in community—is that I can’t run and hide when I need to cry or when I experience some other difficult emotion that I usually keep under extremely tight control. So I cried in public many times over the competition weekend. I cried when my daughter ran off stage after a great performance and threw her arms around me. I cried when she made a mistake and sobbed in my lap. I cried when I saw her teammates’ moms or her teachers congratulating or comforting her. (I cried when I had to drag her dance bag across three blocks of fresh snow at 12:30 in the morning.)
But the reward was being supported and cheerleaded on by the moms I had initially judged. It was experiencing those emotions in a group of people who understood them. All the shit I’ve endlessly complained about was backgrounded by my astonishment that my daughter and her friends could walk up on stage three-by-three (or eight-by-eight or two-by-two or one at a time depending on the dance, again, it would take months to explain) and flawlessly execute complex steps for a panel of judges and a crowd of spectators. The ridiculous trappings of this sport faded away as I watched these girls and boys be brave in a way I’m still searching for.
It’s an out-of-body experience to watch your child do something that is not a product of any of your guidance or teaching, so I spent most of the competition floating a bit outside myself. It was like watching a magician pull a spray-tanned, wigged-up, glittery rabbit out of a hat. And if the dancing was a magic trick, the men behind the curtain were the dance moms.
When my daughter walked onstage to dance, the lights hit the glued-on jewels on her dress just right and she looked like a precious gem. She looked in real life like she always looks in my head. And then a whole group of dancers lined up for judging and it was almost blinding, each glimmering girl representing a deep well of dedication and parental sacrifice and raw skill. I looked at the dance moms next to me and saw my emotions mirrored in and amplified by theirs. Instead of suspicion, I let go and let myself feel awe.
