Over the weekend, the kid and I went to a free student dance performance, a generous and sort of harrowing part of the LA private school recruitment strategy. Come see our kids dance! Fall in love with the school! Now good luck to you on your application! No guarantees! We decided to go to the show — acceptance or not — and wandered into a beautiful theatre packed with parents of tweens and teens, where water and Sun Chips were on sale for $2, bouquets for $20, younger siblings were running through the aisles.
I expected nothing, but the dances were lovely: The truly gifted kids got the same air time as the kids who clearly just loved to dance, which gave me a very good feeling about the school. It was a delightful way to spend an afternoon, a sweet window through which to consider our kid’s evolving education. Would we see her on this stage next year? On some other stage? Who the hell knew. Did it matter? I felt remarkable relaxed about the whole thing.
And then suddenly, like a true true true lunatic, I was crying. Like, ugly crying, and trying with all my might to hide it because I did not know a single one of these kids. I had no skin in the game!
The piece that set me off, the last one of the afternoon, was danced by a group of seniors to Adele’s “When We Were Young.” While they danced, their baby pictures were flashing behind them like some sort of emotional torture device, and I was sitting next to my own kid on the precipice of middle school — a kid who seems to be growing up all too fast and all too painfully — and I also, somehow, always associate that song with my being 25 (maybe because it’s on Adele’s album, 25? or maybe because it came out when I was 36 and I thought of 25 as young?), and anyway, it’s a song steeped in nostalgia, that is its entire point. So. There was a lot of crying. The kid turned to me and whispered, “Who are those babies?” — the pudgy versions of the aforementioned teens dancing — and I could barely squeak out, “it’s them.”
When it was all over, she looked over and said, only sort of embarrassed for me, “Are you crying???” And I could not stop! I really could not. And I kept saying to myself, as the dancers bowed and we clapped, you must pull yourself together before you have to exit this auditorium and show your face to a bunch of parents who surely know that you do not know any of these kids and you are having a humiliating nervous breakdown because of Adele.
Watching your kids grow up is indecent. It is a joy and a privilege and of course — OF COURSE — I would have it no other way — knock on all the wood — but there are years when things change and there are years when Things Change and the growing pains involved, for the whole family, are so staggering it sort of takes over the tenor of the home. It becomes impossible to escape the reality that the child you once grew inside your own body (when we were young) and nursed with your own tits and held in every pocket of night and taught to eat and walk, the baby you cuddled when she was sick and sad and lonely and you sent off to daycare and then to elementary school is one day going to be that graduating senior with her perfect baby-self flashing across the screen while she dances in her teenage body (!) to Adele and you’re going to, again, think of her as a baby and think of yourself at 36 thinking of yourself at 25, and it’s going to be all too much.
But before they actually leave you, they are going to go through the most harrowing gauntlet of changes — the only way to grow up it turns out — and you’re going to have to stand there like a Goddamn tree and bare it all. You’re going to have to cry in the dark.
But then there was one girl, one dancer: I’d seen her before because she’s part of the kid’s dance studio here and we’ve been watching her for years. She is one of those people who was really meant to dance, her body simply knows what to do, all the effort is hidden. Every time she came onstage, I could only watch her, or, as the kid put it: “She made every dance she was in better.”
Finally, many many many dances into this sort of interminable performance — but before my breakdown at the end — she did her solo to “Take Me to Church” and rather than feel what I’d felt for most of the show, touched by how sweet it was to see these girls leap and turn and enjoy themselves onstage, I felt my body moving along with hers. Here was a dancer.
This is a felt memory: one of my best friends from college, another dancer, always moves when she watches people move. You know she is captivated by a dancer when her own torso tilts forward and sideways, when her eyes take on a kind of intense, glazed glare. It was an honor when you realized she was watching you move by moving, too.
This is what happened to me with this young woman: I caught myself moving in my seat along with her. And as trite as it sounds, I realized why we say we are moved by something — in this case I was quite literally moved! My body could not handle what she was offering up by staying still, she had displaced something inside me enough to set me in motion, to set me off-kilter, to take me along for the ride, her ride.
This doesn’t happen as often with other art forms — I don’t usually move while reading or looking at art — but certainly I do when listening to music or seeing spectacular dance and even sometimes at the theatre. Sometimes in class, when someone reads something they’ve just written that is truly surprising, I do find myself leaning into the screen. My body has been set alight. I finally feel something; I’ve merged with the material in some way.
When I was watching this girl dance, I felt not only the bittersweet pain of growing up, the heartbreak of it all — which feels like the only register I can touch into these days — but also the possibilities of a future, too. It wasn’t, of course, all loss, this business of becoming a teenager, of growing into adulthood.
By possibilities, I don’t mean to imply that this girl will have a professional dance career; I don’t know what’s in store for her. But her talent and skill and obvious devotion reminded me that our kids growing up and into themselves is also unbelievable, it is a gain, too. I imagined her mother filled with such pride at seeing her own daughter embody her love so completely in front of such a big crowd. I imagined this love launching her into the next phase of her life, like it did for me, it being a kind of secure base to grow from. (Look, I’d never recommend a dance career as a “secure base,” but it certainly can support you in all sorts of other, fundamental ways, I can vouch for that.)
We left the theatre, eyes dried, and got back into the car, busily chatting about who was good and what our favorite dances were and we turned Taylor Swift back on, because that’s all that plays on repeat these days, and I tried to hold it all: the girl clutching the program in the backseat on the cusp of something unknown; my own younger self dancing on all those stages in other cities, hoping to move a single audience member; another younger but older version of me holding the baby-turned-girl from the backseat. I tried not to cry. I tried.
Sending love,
Abs xo
ALL THE THINGS We had the most delightful Sunday Casual yesterday. If you’d like to get early access to writing classes you can sign up here (scroll to bottom). Next round starts in April! I’ve been dipping around in a lot of books lately: The Gottman’s Fight Right, Come Together by Emily Nagoski, and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It. This week I’m going to dive into Sloane Crosely’s Grief is for People, I read Leslie Jamison’s Splinters (who wants to discuss?). I’ve fallen in love with this song and of course this one. Loved this episode of Everything Happens with Sarah Polley and laughed my way through this ridiculous interview with Adam Grant and Jennifer Garner. More on the horrifying IVF case in Alabama and a deeper dive here, and this beautiful piece by Kate Suddes.
xx
Absolutely BEAUTIFUL, Abby. I can never get over how perfectly you describe motherhood moments! I love it so much!! ❤️🔥
Whelp, now I'm crying, too. Ava is turning 2 on Wednesday, so much closer in age to the babies in the pictures than to the dancers, but still, your description catapulted me into our future.