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Waiting For Ballet

Written by: Mariah Boone ~ Web Site: Lone Star Ma Magazine

Anne Shirley, the heroine of L.M. Montgomery’s classic Anne of Green Gables books, discovers as she grows up that “kindred spirits” are a lot more common than she had thought they were in her childhood. Motherhood is very like that. I think the world could also be very like that, if we let it.
My six-year-old takes ballet classes for forty-five minutes every Thursday evening. Her classes are held in a ballet school housed in a venerable older building that might once have been a stately home. It is almost entirely studio space now, and the parents of the little ballet students spend the class time in a rather extremely cramped lobby while the children dance in an adjoining studio. The lobby has a window into the studio, but the window is curtained so that one must peer up from underneath it to get a glance into the classroom. Once a term, parents are welcomed into the studio to watch the class. Mostly, we wait rather than watch.
Communities are born of strange circumstances.
When my daughter first started ballet, we knew one other child in the class from school. Several of the other children had been taking dancing classes together for a couple of years. As time has passed, other families have come to the school, mostly strangers and one neighbor. Always during class, the lobby is filled to a toddlers-on-laps-and-some-standing level of bursting with mothers, the siblings of ballet students and the occasional father or grandparent. Waiting for ballet.
We know each other now. The brothers who used to dread the idea of waiting for ballet now look forward to playing chess with each other on the floor. Toddlers are passed around the lobby like community property, with everybody feeding them. Homeowner’s insurance, schools, houses, husbands, mothers-in-law and birthday parties are discussed in their most intimate details. We watch out for each other’s children when a mother has to run an errand and make sure that no little people sneak out the door unchaperoned. We are a community.
I can’t say exactly how it happened, but at some amorphous point we stopped being strangers and became this community of mothers and children. I am always humbled in any venue in which this spirit of community arises…it is such a natural occurrence between the mothers of children and yet it is a miraculous thing of beauty and power, as well. It is a microcosm of a world that cooperates peacefully and accepts strangers as self. There is some conflict, like the day when a local principal overheard another mother criticizing the public schools, but it is brief and reasonably managed. I wish more people could, in these small unintentional eruptions of community, see the potential for community on a more global scale. World peace is just this: finding oneself in a small space with people that you may not have much in common with and turning it into a safe place together. I don’t think it can be much different than waiting for ballet.

Mariah Boone is a mother, social worker, writer and the publisher of Lone Star Ma: The Magazine of Progressive Texas Parenting and Children’s Issues. For more information, or to subscribe to Lone Star Ma, go to www.LoneStarMa.com.