"Whattya mean the parents can't watch?"

My daughter takes ballet class.  Of course she does.  Why wouldn’t she?  She is an American kid of the girl variety; pigtailed and turbo-charged.  She needs something to do; so why not ballet?  Despite the fact that it is nothing fancy or extravagant (the blogging world has yet to turn me into an overnight “hundredaire”), it means the world to her.  She jumps, tumbles, learns French words and gets some very solid girl time once per week.  I love that she is in ballet even though the decidedly “anti princess” part of me is watching these dance teachers like a hawk.  No princesses allowed.

So that attitude kind of sets the stage for understanding my tenuous relationship with ballet class.  At its most basic level, I agree to pay them and have the half-pint there dressed and ready to go at the appointed hour.  That’s my side of the deal.  And I love that my daughter loves it.  Truly, she can hardly contain herself on “ballet nights” because she is so excited to go and dance, and flip, and tumble for 40 minutes.  What really feeds my concern, however, is their side of the deal.  It seems that in exchange for me paying them and having the kiddo here at the appointed hour; they take the kiddo and go into a room where the parents may not tread and play music for 40 minutes after which the child appears rosy cheeked and asking for food and water. Yes, what is really giving me heartburn over the whole deal is this idea that the parents are not permitted to watch ballet class.

For those of you with non-dancing kids, I will repeat that.  The. Parents. Are. Not. Permitted. To. Watch.

Hmmmph.  Nothing in my recent memory has made me feel so old and grouchy as being told I cannot watch my daughter dressed in her cute little ballet dress (funded by yours truly) and her fancy little ballet slippers (also provided by the SmTD Endowment for the Arts) with her hair braided and gorgeous (done each night before class by her mom) flip, and leap, and giggle, and strive, and overcome, and achieve.  I want to see her soar; but I also want to see her struggle to get there.  I want to cheer at the recital, but I am being robbed of the journey that precedes that finish line.  Telling the parents they can watch at the recital and two practices a YEAR just feels like someone is being a ninny about the whole thing (to me anyhow – and I realize that dance class has been this way since the first cavemen took their cavedaughters off to cave-ballet class and the first cavewomen said “take it outside, bub.”)

So instead of sitting there bursting with pride, enthusiasm, fear, hope and all of the other really good things that grip a parent watching their kid apply herself; I sit with all the other parents in the hallway, fiddling on the smart phone or reading books.  I sit there wondering how much joy I am missing; wondering what images I might be seeing the memory of which will warm my heart and blur my vision well into my old age. I sit there, writing this blog entry and deleting it over and over because it sounds so crabby in comparison to how much my daughter LOVES ballet.

I sit and wonder how things would be if we handled baseball, or swimming, or football this way.  When I had knee surgery, my wife had the option of watching the operation from the hospital’s operating theater.  If a surgeon can slice into the really ouchy parts of my body and somehow withstand the observation of some uninvolved yet otherwise interested third party, then, and excuse me for saying it so bluntly, what the hell kind of atomic research are they doing at 5 year-old ballet class that I can’t sneak a peak of my daughter being every bit the 5 year old whirlwind I imagine her to be?

So, I will make this promise.  I will keep my grousing about ballet class limited to these electronic pages, and I will follow up this grouchy rant with some assessment of my feelings AFTER the recital, but for now I am contentedly grumpy with ballet class.  Maybe next term I will just have to sign up with her so I can get inside the door.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today.  I hope that wherever you are, whatever you are doing today, you are doing it in a fashion that those who are warmed by the mere thought of you can cheer you on, wave to you, and chant your name.

Dennis

smalltowndad@hotmail.com