The night after I gave birth to my daughter, I could not, for the goddamn life of me, fall asleep. I was laden with the thickest, most extraordinary exhaustion of my life, and there I was still: inundated by the specific strain of adrenaline that comes with delivering your perfect first child, who was now inexplicably outside of my uterus and swaddled within an inch of her life.
So sleep I did not. Instead, I began what became something of a nightly ritual for the many restless evenings to come: I watched the Royal Ballet’s 2018 rendition of Swan Lake, in its near entirety, on YouTube. The pas de deux between Prince Siegfried and his beloved Odette brought me back into my own chest as my daughter’s rose and fell beside me.
I could barely move, of course, but night after night while the newborn phase beat on, I would watch Sleeping Beauty and Romeo Juliet—and as the seasonal festivities approached, The Nutcracker—and imagine what it might feel like to move wholly as myself again.
I was not, and have never been, a capital-B ballerina. I had spent much of my childhood in various ballet studios, ostensibly as a vehicle to support my competitive gymnastics training. That ballet did not originate as a priority, however, meant that I was not entirely committed to the enthusiasm that it necessitates—and this became a problem.
Ultimately, ballet is a practice of discipline, from the exact pink of your tights (a gauzy, delicate salmon) to the manner in which you conclude class (with a choreographed curtsy called a révérence). I once had a teacher who booted pupils from her session if she witnessed them yawning. It was an outsized consequence for 10 year olds, to be sure, but it also left a taste of what the balletic arts had in store for you, should you choose to pursue it. Ballet offers a legacy of incomparable expression, but also of tremendous control, and one is not possible without the other. The boundaries facilitate the art.
It was a world in which I felt comfortable, as dictated by rules a French man from the 1600s made up. And the more time I spent in that world, the more I admired it. In retrospect, it was, perhaps, the most intense a teenager could be about an extracurricular activity. I had no tangible future in dance, but it was almost more compelling that way, having nothing to prove.
In the many years since I left my hometown studio, went to college, and eventually moved from Illinois to New York City, I’ve found myself in one ballet class or another, often in moments of inflection in my life. There was the stuffy second-floor studio on the Upper East Side where I enrolled when I started my first big-girl magazine job, or the wildly delightful performance center in Hell’s Kitchen when I quit.
After all, ballet was my old, stoic friend, and she was always there when needed to sink back into a rigid pool of nostalgia at whichever crossroads I found myself. Through moves uptown and downtown, to Manhattan and now, most recently, back to the Midwest again, my threadbare Capezio bag never left the back of my closet.
By the time I became a mother, I came to live out the adage that two things can be true: I had never felt more at peace with myself, yet never had my physical form felt so estranged. Never mind the vague softness that crept outward from my now-vacant belly: Growing and delivering and ultimately feeding a child transformed the most minute physiological details. My right hip makes a bizarre noise now; my feet are a handful of centimeters wider; even my teeth are in different places than they once were. It happens, my mom told me about six months into parenthood. It happens all the time.
It was here, at my single post-delivery follow-up, that my obstetrician told me about a phenomenon called “matresence,” or the physical, psychological, and emotional transition that can occur when one becomes a mother. The term was coined in the 1970s by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but has not been heavily studied in the wider medical community in the decades since. Still, my physician shared, a fair amount of anecdotal evidence abounds as to how to navigate this strange new chapter. Had I thought about exercising?
I laughed. The omniscient algorithm fueling my TikTok’s “For You” page had already decided I needed to watch a video of an adult person taking up ballet every seven minutes. This was in the latter half of 2022, at the crest of fashion’s “balletcore” wave that is best embodied by graceful, hyper-girlish styles like square-toe flats and soft wrap-tops. I’m vain enough to admit that I’ve always appreciated ballet for its aesthetics, the flitty silk skirts, the crepe-pink ribbons. There can be brutal power in such clinical femininity. (We’ve all seen Black Swan.) So off I went, to rescue that Capezio bag—this time from the depths of a sad, blue storage tub—and pay my respects to that old friend once again. I had a relationship with a body to regain.
Now back in class, I find my limbs don’t fly quite the same way they did in my last pre-pandemic ballet kick, let alone when I was at my peak at 16. My body, which I’m proud to say is no longer a mere acquaintance, and I have acclimated—though I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t sting that I can no longer pull off a squeaky-clean pirouette or that my knees twinge with every grand plié.
Ira Glass has mused about this: There’s this gap that exists when you’re trying to make stuff, but you know it’s stuff that isn’t good. Most people die in that gap, he says, because they just stop creating work. But you have to soldier through the stickiness and keep creating the work, keep making the bad stuff. It’s the only way out.
My ballet may not be “good.” But I know it’s not bad, either. And even if it was, well, who is to be the judge? I’m an incessant perfectionist who loves the color pink, and who was fortunate enough to find a shrapnel of joy in something beautiful early on. “Good” or “bad,” sometimes just that can be enough.
My childhood ballet center had a big, smudgy window between the lobby and the studio space through which caregivers could watch their tiny dependents take class. I want my daughter to find her own shrapnels of joy and unfurl her own path, like a giant carpet she may need help to roll out. But one day, maybe, I can bring her to watch her mother sweat and grapple, and she can see what it looks like to, quite simply, make the stuff. To not die in the gap. And to find her own ballet, that will be always there when she may need it most.