Once a Mother, Always a Mother

Maritime Festival, Hyannis Harbor, June 2012

Way, way back in the early Mommy days, I began taking my daughters to dance classes.  I sometimes I was able to sit on the edge of the class and watch six year old bodies learning go plie and move to music.  How I wished I could have done that as a child.  Over the years both daughters took ballet classes and I went to many recitals as well as the classes.  I loved watching them dance, imperfect as such dances were, my daughters were always the best, the prettiest and I hardly saw the other little girls ... of course! Later there were competitive gymnastic classes which also thrilled me -- how wonderful it must be to swing on the parallel bars!

Once, years later, I signed up for a dance-exercise class in NYC with retired prima ballerina Melissa Hayden.  I was in my early 40s and a yoga practitioner, the class members ranged from 20s to 60s. I found I was too self-conscious and physically too unmusical to do well in the class.  If only I could have started at six ... Ah well, I learned a bit about myself.

Motherhood and performances never cease.  Yesterday Rachel's dance group -- mostly dance, partly exercise, participants from early 20s to early 60s -- did a four minute performance at the local Maritime Festival, one of the first tourist based events of the summer.  There she is on the far right, well into her 40s but obviously (to me, of course) the best dancer in the group.  She told me when it was over that I wasn't the only mother who had come to watch an adult daughter dance. What did they dance to?  The Pop-eye polka, what else?