Dancing In the Living Room
In exactly a week, S will turn 16.
In two days, my father’s sweetheart, green card denied, will head back to Greece for good, praying that after what we hope is a brief, medical bump-in-the-road is resolved, he will be able to join her.
In five days, S’s brother, one year younger than her, will move across the country to his new home with his soon-to-be-adoptive father, a kind, smart man who works at a college in the south.
On the day M flies with his new father, F, to his new home, S will wake up after her first real birthday party; last year’s hardly counts, because it was also her adoption party, and included a ceremony and 100 people. This year, she’ll have over a small group of peers who have been kind enough to include her, as much as possible, in their activities.
And then, S and I and our dog will drive to Ohio, where in addition to trying to sort out my father’s medical issues and expenses, I’ll attend my 20th high school reunion.
This week, I developed an urge to go back to the novel I started years ago, thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could get up the energy to finish it once and for all. It is in second draft and needs a lot of work.
I can’t find it. I know it’s on my laptop, which at the moment refuses to turn on. I’m sure it’s retrievable—my laptop may be dead, but certainly the documents and photos can be retrieved—but I won’t have time to deal with this until after our trip.
None of these things seem related in any way to one another, and yet, somehow I feel there is a thread here.
In 2005, in between teaching a study abroad course and a romantic getaway with my then partner, I spent a little over a week researching the details of some little-known events that occurred during the Greek Civil War, visiting the site of one of the camps on a small, remote island where Communist and other suspect women were sent to be "reformed." Some of them died there. Some agreed to be loyal to the church and the nation, and were set free. Others simply waited out the war and ended up living rather unremarkable lives in the suburbs of Athens. I interviewed two of them, and talked to historians who could have sent me to others if it hadn’t been for the fact that my time was limited. The novel emerged indirectly from the stories I collected there, and I still believe it is worth finishing.
These women were outsider activists, and I felt connected to them. (No, I’ve never been sent to a work camp for my beliefs or political actions, of course, but their intensely personal reasons for joining the movement come from the same root as my intensely personal reasons for being politically active, and even for adopting S, albeit in a much less visible or dangerous way). And yet they’d somehow managed, after that period of activism, to settle into ordinary lives. Of course, nobody goes on unchanged—certainly the way they raised their children, or voted, or lived in relation to the men in their lives, was marked by their feminism?
I couldn’t get them to answer that question. One of them, when asked, said, but didn’t you come to hear about me during the war? And she was right, I had. And yet, the novel ends up being about their (imagined) lives afterwards, with interspersed scenes from the past. The women in the novel never feel totally at home—in their bodies, their families, their lives. And yet, they are able, at times, to be fully present, and these moments of presence are what save them, and their families.
Like most things I write, I am just now realizing that this is the core of the novel-in-second-draft, and just now realizing how it relates to my own life. I have felt passionate about every brave thing I’ve ever done for two reasons: because I hoped that my action would change me or the world in some small way, and because the action would help me feel, for lack of a better phrase, fully alive.
But see, the bravest thing I've ever done--choosing to raise a teenage girl adopted from foster care--turns out to be much harder than I thought it would be. That is, perhaps, the understatement of the century. Right now, though, things are especially hard, because S has become completely and utterly obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with the idea of going on pointe. And yes, I’ve been through much worse things with her—attempts to run away, physical violence directed at me, words I’d never imagined anyone saying to me—but somehow, this has become the first truly insurmountable struggle for me, the first behavior pattern that I simply cannot understand, to which I truly don’t know how to respond.
Because, when I say obsessed, I mean that from the moment she wakes up until the moment she finally falls asleep, she is doing one of the following:
--watching U-Tube videos about pointe
--talking about what it will be like when she’s finally on pointe
--sewing a tutu
--putting on a leotard and tights and practicing in the living room
--walking across town on the tips of her toes
--etc. There’s really no point in going on. You get the picture, and I’m exhausted even by recounting this much of it.
Everybody is unsure about how to deal with this. The group of smart, kind kids who have befriended her, who protect her, who stick out her series of inappropriate e-mails and text messages and comments, who will no doubt show up for her birthday party this weekend out of kindness—they try to change the subject, but they can’t. Her college buddies can’t figure out a way to distract her—even horse lessons and outings turn out, somehow, to become about pointe.
We’ve been taking lessons together from a patient and good teacher for about six months. She’s made tremendous progress already—she has learned to hear a beat, she can make her body do at least some of the things the teacher is asking. But this progress is not enough for her; she wants to be on pointe, now. She will DIE if she can’t be on pointe soon. She MEANS it.
Why? we all ask her, over and over, but there is no answer. I call her therapist and tell her this obsession is driving me crazy. Please try to get to the bottom of it in your next session, I say on her voicemail. Infuriatingly, S exits the therapist’s office wearing her ballet shoes; she goes up on her toes while saying, “When we get home, can we go to your office so I can watch some pointe videos before bed?” I mean, I realize her therapist can’t tell me exactly what they’ve discussed, but still—the obsession seemed to intensify after the session.
Finally, two days later, after being asked the same question in multiple ways by her college buddies and me—why pointe?--she tells me that she asked her foster parents for ballet lessons, but they wouldn’t pay for them, so now she feels this need to catch up. I SHOULD have been in ballet all along, but now I’m SO BEHIND, she says. This is no surprise—her foster parents were good people who were not willing to go out of their way to help her explore her interests, mainly, I think, because they had a total of five foster or adopted-from-foster-care children in their home when she lived there and were overwhelmed (though I’m feeling particularly generous right now).
A day after this conversation, she answers the question in yet a new way: she thinks maybe she was in ballet as a child, but she’s not sure. She does remember, though, being abused while wearing tights and a leotard. It’s not clear exactly whether she was abused after ballet class, or whether this was an outfit she was forced to wear by her abusers—she can’t remember, or won’t. She does know the scary men in her life, her father, the father of some of her brothers who lived with them occasionally, other men, maybe, told her how much they liked the way she looked in a leotard and tights.
What does it feel like now, to put them on? I ask her.
Scary, she says. Very, very scary.
And yet she puts them on often—and not just for class. Maybe, she says tentatively, maybe if I go up on pointe I’ll know I’ve won.
Won what?
That I’ve survived it all, once and for all.
But you already know that, I say.
No, not really, she answers, and it breaks my heart.
It makes sense, if you think about it. She is pushing the boundaries in the way all good activists do, because, after all, how else can anyone live with any kind of integrity if they don’t take the biggest risks and set the highest goals? Of course, her activism isn’t about any big principles—but that’s what makes it even more compelling for her, more obsessive. It’s about her own healing.
What we all want, I think, is to be at home in our own bodies and lives, and we so rarely feel that. Or maybe it’s just me, and my daughter, and people like us who have faced hardship, on a small or large scale, who rarely feel that—I don’t know. I do know that S’s obsession with pointe is about wanting to achieve this sense of home, once and for all.
Today, I talked with our ballet teacher, who is both intuitive and smart. Of course I knew right away that she didn’t feel her own body, she said, and I also knew right away that it wasn’t a physical problem, but an emotional one. She advised me not to worry too much about this obsession. She’s working it out, and I’ll work with her, she says. You have to work with her, too.
She’s right, of course. If this is how S will find her way home—or how she’ll learn that maybe that feeling that she’s looking for isn’t really totally achievable, and that this is OK—then I need to ride this roller coaster (or dance this dance?) along with her.
I have chosen this place, my small MN town, as home because it has some remnants of the home I lost—without the pressure of needing to be...well, straight, or married, or Greek Orthodox, I guess, among other things. In a way, it’s the best of both worlds—I can experience all the positive aspects of the close-knit community, and when things get ugly (gossipy, cruel, dangerous), I am an outsider who can see what is happening clearly, and, hopefully, act with integrity without shaming my entire line of ancestors. For years, I wrestled every day with whether or not I truly feel at home here, but now that my stay is nearing the 10 year mark, I’ve become more and more OK with not being sure about what it means to be home.
But I still have my moments. Last night, right before bed, I began for some reason to obsess about what would happen to S if something ever happened to me, who I could really trust to care for her, and who would actually be capable or willing. Somehow, in my ruminations, I came to the conclusion that if I'd never left home, this wouldn't be such an issue--my family would know her better, she would know them. Of course, if I hadn't left home, I probably never would have been brave enough to adopt her in the first place.
When I left my hometown, my Greek-American community, I also gave up all of my high school friendships, partly just because we all went our separate ways, but also, in some cases, very deliberately, not wanting to go through more heart-wrenching “how did I not know? How did you not know?” coming out conversations. It didn’t seem worth it. Since getting on facebook, many high school friends have friended me, and I’ve gotten several sweet messages saying, essentially, why in the world did you ever think I would care?
I recently looked back at my freshman year yearbook, because S wanted to compare hers to mine. We laughed about the funny clothes and hairstyles of the mid-80s, but I was struck by how many people, including people I don’t actually remember, had written about feeling like they could talk to me, like I understood them. This is both a gift and a curse, an aspect of my personality that makes it possible, I think, to write real characters and to adopt and love a child like Lisa—but it also means that I have intense and deep relationships, sometimes painful ones. I was startled, honestly, to realize that this aspect of my personality had been alive and well in 1985, that maybe I haven’t changed as much as I imagine I have.
And so, soon, I will go to my hometown, and my high school reunion, and my father’s rented apartment, which both won’t and will be like going home. Before that, S will turn 16. Before that, her brother M and his father F will move in together, and their lives and idea of home will be changed profoundly and beautifully as mine was. Before that, my father's sweetheart will go back to the house she's lived in for some 50 years, but it will not feel totally like home because now, my father won't be with her as planned.
I can’t imagine being at home unless S is part of the image now, and that is a beautiful thing, and something I honestly don’t think I’ve ever felt about another person in my life.
Maybe home is whatever is essential to who we are, whatever we carry with us. Maybe, for S and for me, it is about that feeling of intensity, of wanting to change things within ourselves and the world, of making the kinds of decisions and setting the kinds of goals that make such things both possible and impossible. Maybe home is both the lost dream, the lost novel, the dead parent, the grown child, and the grace with which we give them up and keep on loving them at the same time.
Maybe it’s also the music, and the dance.
In a feeble attempt to get her off her point obsession, I suggest we put on a series of CDs—all different types of music—to practice finding the beat. It’s practice for pointe, I tell her, and she complies--and for a whole afternoon we dance together to all my old favorites, old Greek songs and Tracy Chapman and the Indigo Girls and Nina Simone and KD Lang and Mary Chapin Carpenter and Joan Baez and...
I like this music, S says.
I try not to act overly enthusiastic about the fact that her Taylor Swift CD had not yet been placed in the CD player. I do, too, I tell her. I haven’t listened to some of these in years. What I don’t tell her is how much I love to move like this, to let the music open me. What I don’t tell her is how, when I look back, all the important phases of my life, pre-college-professor, have been marked by dancing—the Greek dances of my childhood, the college bars, the lesbian bars—and how sometimes I think if only I could dance here, I would be truly at home.
But that feeling of longing doesn’t last. Instead, my whole self moves into that being-in-the-present-fully-blessed feeling that is indescribable. This music belongs to a much younger me, but it is also the music of this moment.
Maybe to really understand home, you have to understand how everything you know and live through and say and do and believe is both permanently fixed within you and completely impermanent.
I’m getting the beat, aren’t I, mom?
I look at her feet for the first time since the second or third song—I’d managed to distract her for at least an hour. You are! I say, legitimately surprised, because she can’t keep a beat to save her life. You really are getting it!
Soon, she says, I’ll be on pointe.
That’s not going to solve everything, you know, I tell her, but she ignores me and switches from really dancing to going up on her toes again, up and down, up and down.
To her credit, she is following the beat to Tracy Chapman’s "Talkin’ About A Revolution," even if the pointe obsession is coming back and I’m feeling a little irritation creep in.
And then she surprises me. I like this song, she says. I think I get what it’s about, even.
Of course you do, I say, without even thinking what I mean.
It’s about standing up for things, she says. And things changing.
That’s right, I tell her.
Maybe we should play this at my wedding, she says, which sounds strange except that we’ve just been to the wedding of two of her beloved tutors, who will soon be moving far away from home, so weddings are on her mind. And you’ll walk me down the aisle when—if—I get married someday, right, mom?
Right, I say, and then the last stanza of the song is over. S sighs and announces she’s tired, and we turn off the music and glide into silence, finally, for awhile.
In two days, my father’s sweetheart, green card denied, will head back to Greece for good, praying that after what we hope is a brief, medical bump-in-the-road is resolved, he will be able to join her.
In five days, S’s brother, one year younger than her, will move across the country to his new home with his soon-to-be-adoptive father, a kind, smart man who works at a college in the south.
On the day M flies with his new father, F, to his new home, S will wake up after her first real birthday party; last year’s hardly counts, because it was also her adoption party, and included a ceremony and 100 people. This year, she’ll have over a small group of peers who have been kind enough to include her, as much as possible, in their activities.
And then, S and I and our dog will drive to Ohio, where in addition to trying to sort out my father’s medical issues and expenses, I’ll attend my 20th high school reunion.
This week, I developed an urge to go back to the novel I started years ago, thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could get up the energy to finish it once and for all. It is in second draft and needs a lot of work.
I can’t find it. I know it’s on my laptop, which at the moment refuses to turn on. I’m sure it’s retrievable—my laptop may be dead, but certainly the documents and photos can be retrieved—but I won’t have time to deal with this until after our trip.
None of these things seem related in any way to one another, and yet, somehow I feel there is a thread here.
In 2005, in between teaching a study abroad course and a romantic getaway with my then partner, I spent a little over a week researching the details of some little-known events that occurred during the Greek Civil War, visiting the site of one of the camps on a small, remote island where Communist and other suspect women were sent to be "reformed." Some of them died there. Some agreed to be loyal to the church and the nation, and were set free. Others simply waited out the war and ended up living rather unremarkable lives in the suburbs of Athens. I interviewed two of them, and talked to historians who could have sent me to others if it hadn’t been for the fact that my time was limited. The novel emerged indirectly from the stories I collected there, and I still believe it is worth finishing.
These women were outsider activists, and I felt connected to them. (No, I’ve never been sent to a work camp for my beliefs or political actions, of course, but their intensely personal reasons for joining the movement come from the same root as my intensely personal reasons for being politically active, and even for adopting S, albeit in a much less visible or dangerous way). And yet they’d somehow managed, after that period of activism, to settle into ordinary lives. Of course, nobody goes on unchanged—certainly the way they raised their children, or voted, or lived in relation to the men in their lives, was marked by their feminism?
I couldn’t get them to answer that question. One of them, when asked, said, but didn’t you come to hear about me during the war? And she was right, I had. And yet, the novel ends up being about their (imagined) lives afterwards, with interspersed scenes from the past. The women in the novel never feel totally at home—in their bodies, their families, their lives. And yet, they are able, at times, to be fully present, and these moments of presence are what save them, and their families.
Like most things I write, I am just now realizing that this is the core of the novel-in-second-draft, and just now realizing how it relates to my own life. I have felt passionate about every brave thing I’ve ever done for two reasons: because I hoped that my action would change me or the world in some small way, and because the action would help me feel, for lack of a better phrase, fully alive.
But see, the bravest thing I've ever done--choosing to raise a teenage girl adopted from foster care--turns out to be much harder than I thought it would be. That is, perhaps, the understatement of the century. Right now, though, things are especially hard, because S has become completely and utterly obsessed, and I mean obsessed, with the idea of going on pointe. And yes, I’ve been through much worse things with her—attempts to run away, physical violence directed at me, words I’d never imagined anyone saying to me—but somehow, this has become the first truly insurmountable struggle for me, the first behavior pattern that I simply cannot understand, to which I truly don’t know how to respond.
Because, when I say obsessed, I mean that from the moment she wakes up until the moment she finally falls asleep, she is doing one of the following:
--watching U-Tube videos about pointe
--talking about what it will be like when she’s finally on pointe
--sewing a tutu
--putting on a leotard and tights and practicing in the living room
--walking across town on the tips of her toes
--etc. There’s really no point in going on. You get the picture, and I’m exhausted even by recounting this much of it.
Everybody is unsure about how to deal with this. The group of smart, kind kids who have befriended her, who protect her, who stick out her series of inappropriate e-mails and text messages and comments, who will no doubt show up for her birthday party this weekend out of kindness—they try to change the subject, but they can’t. Her college buddies can’t figure out a way to distract her—even horse lessons and outings turn out, somehow, to become about pointe.
We’ve been taking lessons together from a patient and good teacher for about six months. She’s made tremendous progress already—she has learned to hear a beat, she can make her body do at least some of the things the teacher is asking. But this progress is not enough for her; she wants to be on pointe, now. She will DIE if she can’t be on pointe soon. She MEANS it.
Why? we all ask her, over and over, but there is no answer. I call her therapist and tell her this obsession is driving me crazy. Please try to get to the bottom of it in your next session, I say on her voicemail. Infuriatingly, S exits the therapist’s office wearing her ballet shoes; she goes up on her toes while saying, “When we get home, can we go to your office so I can watch some pointe videos before bed?” I mean, I realize her therapist can’t tell me exactly what they’ve discussed, but still—the obsession seemed to intensify after the session.
Finally, two days later, after being asked the same question in multiple ways by her college buddies and me—why pointe?--she tells me that she asked her foster parents for ballet lessons, but they wouldn’t pay for them, so now she feels this need to catch up. I SHOULD have been in ballet all along, but now I’m SO BEHIND, she says. This is no surprise—her foster parents were good people who were not willing to go out of their way to help her explore her interests, mainly, I think, because they had a total of five foster or adopted-from-foster-care children in their home when she lived there and were overwhelmed (though I’m feeling particularly generous right now).
A day after this conversation, she answers the question in yet a new way: she thinks maybe she was in ballet as a child, but she’s not sure. She does remember, though, being abused while wearing tights and a leotard. It’s not clear exactly whether she was abused after ballet class, or whether this was an outfit she was forced to wear by her abusers—she can’t remember, or won’t. She does know the scary men in her life, her father, the father of some of her brothers who lived with them occasionally, other men, maybe, told her how much they liked the way she looked in a leotard and tights.
What does it feel like now, to put them on? I ask her.
Scary, she says. Very, very scary.
And yet she puts them on often—and not just for class. Maybe, she says tentatively, maybe if I go up on pointe I’ll know I’ve won.
Won what?
That I’ve survived it all, once and for all.
But you already know that, I say.
No, not really, she answers, and it breaks my heart.
It makes sense, if you think about it. She is pushing the boundaries in the way all good activists do, because, after all, how else can anyone live with any kind of integrity if they don’t take the biggest risks and set the highest goals? Of course, her activism isn’t about any big principles—but that’s what makes it even more compelling for her, more obsessive. It’s about her own healing.
What we all want, I think, is to be at home in our own bodies and lives, and we so rarely feel that. Or maybe it’s just me, and my daughter, and people like us who have faced hardship, on a small or large scale, who rarely feel that—I don’t know. I do know that S’s obsession with pointe is about wanting to achieve this sense of home, once and for all.
Today, I talked with our ballet teacher, who is both intuitive and smart. Of course I knew right away that she didn’t feel her own body, she said, and I also knew right away that it wasn’t a physical problem, but an emotional one. She advised me not to worry too much about this obsession. She’s working it out, and I’ll work with her, she says. You have to work with her, too.
She’s right, of course. If this is how S will find her way home—or how she’ll learn that maybe that feeling that she’s looking for isn’t really totally achievable, and that this is OK—then I need to ride this roller coaster (or dance this dance?) along with her.
I have chosen this place, my small MN town, as home because it has some remnants of the home I lost—without the pressure of needing to be...well, straight, or married, or Greek Orthodox, I guess, among other things. In a way, it’s the best of both worlds—I can experience all the positive aspects of the close-knit community, and when things get ugly (gossipy, cruel, dangerous), I am an outsider who can see what is happening clearly, and, hopefully, act with integrity without shaming my entire line of ancestors. For years, I wrestled every day with whether or not I truly feel at home here, but now that my stay is nearing the 10 year mark, I’ve become more and more OK with not being sure about what it means to be home.
But I still have my moments. Last night, right before bed, I began for some reason to obsess about what would happen to S if something ever happened to me, who I could really trust to care for her, and who would actually be capable or willing. Somehow, in my ruminations, I came to the conclusion that if I'd never left home, this wouldn't be such an issue--my family would know her better, she would know them. Of course, if I hadn't left home, I probably never would have been brave enough to adopt her in the first place.
When I left my hometown, my Greek-American community, I also gave up all of my high school friendships, partly just because we all went our separate ways, but also, in some cases, very deliberately, not wanting to go through more heart-wrenching “how did I not know? How did you not know?” coming out conversations. It didn’t seem worth it. Since getting on facebook, many high school friends have friended me, and I’ve gotten several sweet messages saying, essentially, why in the world did you ever think I would care?
I recently looked back at my freshman year yearbook, because S wanted to compare hers to mine. We laughed about the funny clothes and hairstyles of the mid-80s, but I was struck by how many people, including people I don’t actually remember, had written about feeling like they could talk to me, like I understood them. This is both a gift and a curse, an aspect of my personality that makes it possible, I think, to write real characters and to adopt and love a child like Lisa—but it also means that I have intense and deep relationships, sometimes painful ones. I was startled, honestly, to realize that this aspect of my personality had been alive and well in 1985, that maybe I haven’t changed as much as I imagine I have.
And so, soon, I will go to my hometown, and my high school reunion, and my father’s rented apartment, which both won’t and will be like going home. Before that, S will turn 16. Before that, her brother M and his father F will move in together, and their lives and idea of home will be changed profoundly and beautifully as mine was. Before that, my father's sweetheart will go back to the house she's lived in for some 50 years, but it will not feel totally like home because now, my father won't be with her as planned.
I can’t imagine being at home unless S is part of the image now, and that is a beautiful thing, and something I honestly don’t think I’ve ever felt about another person in my life.
Maybe home is whatever is essential to who we are, whatever we carry with us. Maybe, for S and for me, it is about that feeling of intensity, of wanting to change things within ourselves and the world, of making the kinds of decisions and setting the kinds of goals that make such things both possible and impossible. Maybe home is both the lost dream, the lost novel, the dead parent, the grown child, and the grace with which we give them up and keep on loving them at the same time.
Maybe it’s also the music, and the dance.
In a feeble attempt to get her off her point obsession, I suggest we put on a series of CDs—all different types of music—to practice finding the beat. It’s practice for pointe, I tell her, and she complies--and for a whole afternoon we dance together to all my old favorites, old Greek songs and Tracy Chapman and the Indigo Girls and Nina Simone and KD Lang and Mary Chapin Carpenter and Joan Baez and...
I like this music, S says.
I try not to act overly enthusiastic about the fact that her Taylor Swift CD had not yet been placed in the CD player. I do, too, I tell her. I haven’t listened to some of these in years. What I don’t tell her is how much I love to move like this, to let the music open me. What I don’t tell her is how, when I look back, all the important phases of my life, pre-college-professor, have been marked by dancing—the Greek dances of my childhood, the college bars, the lesbian bars—and how sometimes I think if only I could dance here, I would be truly at home.
But that feeling of longing doesn’t last. Instead, my whole self moves into that being-in-the-present-fully-blessed feeling that is indescribable. This music belongs to a much younger me, but it is also the music of this moment.
Maybe to really understand home, you have to understand how everything you know and live through and say and do and believe is both permanently fixed within you and completely impermanent.
I’m getting the beat, aren’t I, mom?
I look at her feet for the first time since the second or third song—I’d managed to distract her for at least an hour. You are! I say, legitimately surprised, because she can’t keep a beat to save her life. You really are getting it!
Soon, she says, I’ll be on pointe.
That’s not going to solve everything, you know, I tell her, but she ignores me and switches from really dancing to going up on her toes again, up and down, up and down.
To her credit, she is following the beat to Tracy Chapman’s "Talkin’ About A Revolution," even if the pointe obsession is coming back and I’m feeling a little irritation creep in.
And then she surprises me. I like this song, she says. I think I get what it’s about, even.
Of course you do, I say, without even thinking what I mean.
It’s about standing up for things, she says. And things changing.
That’s right, I tell her.
Maybe we should play this at my wedding, she says, which sounds strange except that we’ve just been to the wedding of two of her beloved tutors, who will soon be moving far away from home, so weddings are on her mind. And you’ll walk me down the aisle when—if—I get married someday, right, mom?
Right, I say, and then the last stanza of the song is over. S sighs and announces she’s tired, and we turn off the music and glide into silence, finally, for awhile.
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