In New Motherhood, Ballet Was a Life Raft

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.