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Thin Pink Line: Teaching My Daughter About a Woman’s Place

Thin Pink Line: Teaching My Daughter About a Woman’s Place

Last updated on: July 2, 2015 at 11:57 am by Erin Wathen

Thin Pink Line: Teaching My Daughter About a Woman’s Place 2015-07-02T11:57:10-07:00 Erin Wathen

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The poorly applied fuchsia lipstick. The nervous stage mothers pounding Starbucks. (The GLITTER SPRAY. God as my witness, there will still be glitter spray eons after the apocalypse. It will outlive the cockroaches and Ted Cruz…) The piles and piles of bobby pins. Strains of Katy Perry lurking around every corner…

It must be recital season. Mercy.

I used to be a dancer. Then I was a dance teacher. Making the leap from performer/choreographer to dance mom has been a stretch for me. Not because I’m grieving some long-dead dreams of Broadway stardom… but because I am far more comfortable positioning kids onstage and shouting out performance notes than I am keeping track of all the tedious details. I could choreograph a ten-year-olds’ jazz, tap or ballet routine in my sleep. But ask me to get my daughter to dress rehearsal on the right day, at the right time, with the right tights and hair pieces, and I am just undone. She had three rehearsals in the weeks before performance, and I screwed up SOMETHING for every single one of them. I was an ok dancer and a pretty great teacher… but put me on the other end of this business, and there is not enough Xanax in the world to entice me to be the “stage mom” in charge of the dressing room scene. No. Way.

Still—inexplicably, I LOVE RECITAL. But my favorite moment from this one was not watching my kid perform. It was watching her in the final dress rehearsal. And the teachable moment I found in the midst of it.

There was one, 30 minute window for the dancers to rehearse the closing number together on the big stage. This is the one number when ALL the dancers, all age groups, perform together. Needless to say, it was pure chaos.

As each class/age group came onstage, they had a certain place where they were supposed to go. With that many dancers onstage, everything depends on each class landing exactly where they are supposed to be—the green tape, the pink tape, the orange tape, etc.

As my daughter’s class came on, she sashayed her tiny bottom right up front to the pink line—while the rest of her class hesitated, balked, and wandered, eventually, back to the green tape. My daughter, after a moment, moved back to join them.

WRONG. Stop everything. The director turned off the music. Hollered a little bit. Start everything over, because the 6/7 year olds went to the wrong tape. (“All but one of them!” I wanted to shout in my best Mama Rose from the back row. But I DIDN’T, I swear.)

They started over, and eventually, everybody got where they were supposed to be. It was still chaos, but it was at least performance-ready chaos.

“You’re doing great!” I said to her during the lunch break between rehearsal and the show. “I can’t wait for Dad and your brother to see you.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But I went to the wrong line.”

“Actually, YOU went to the right place, ” I said. Then you moved because everybody ELSE was in the wrong place.”

“Yeah…”

And then I had one of those “THIS FEELS WAY TOO IMPORTANT” parenting moments… And I imparted some motherly wisdom that is about so much more than dance, and that I hope she will always remember.

“Listen,” I said. “ALWAYS go where YOU think is the right place. And then maybe other people will follow you there. And you might be wrong sometimes too… But it’s better than being wrong just because everybody else was.”

And then I watched her little wheels turning and I thought, damn, this is a deep chat to be having in this big cloud of glitter spray.

Come performance time, the whole class made it up to the pink line. And it was fine, but would have been fine if they’d totally jacked it up for all time, too.

Thing is, my daughter is not the most graceful or coordinated kid out there. She’s long and gangly like her dad, so she’s basically a baby giraffe who has not quite figured out how to reconcile the distance from her brain to the tips of her toes. But she is a truly joyful performer. She has beautiful form, and given the chance to grow into her limbs, she could be an extraordinary dancer.

But I don’t care. She can be a volley ball player, a track star, or the first chair cellist—all places that her joy and her long limbs can carry her. But wherever she goes, I want her to trust her instincts. I want her to hold her own values above those of the masses; and to value her own self deeply, even when she might be wrong.

I want her to step to the front, even when others hang back; or when people tell her (I triple dog dare them) that she belongs back there, too.

I trust that there will be other days and other ways for her to learn gracious humility, the value of team work, and the gift of, sometimes, empowering other people to lead. But on recital day, I couldn’t help but tell her that she was right to stand up front. She was right to trust herself, to take the lead, and to sling a sassy hip on the downbeat.

Maybe it was the glitter spray. But I think the day, in all its chaos, was pretty sparkly after all.

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