As a kid, I was never a ballerina in a fluffy tutu. I hated dresses. I played with stuffed animals, not dolls. I grew up being called a Tom-Boy. But recently, I stumbled into a Ballet Barre Workout class at my health club, when I was late for the class I meant to attend, and now ballet barre is my favorite thing.
Our teacher is tough. “Pull in those abs, Sarah. Harder. Tuck in your bottom, Sarah. Turn your feet out.” And I love it. When she tells us “to look straight toward the horizon and plié with dignity,” we do and beam. Our inner five-year-olds are very happy. We don’t care the mirrors lining the walls are trying to remind us of a different reality. We check our positions, tuck in our butts, and “gaze at the people in the loge box seats.”
Our teacher treats us like ballerinas. Maybe it’s her piano music tape, or her careful corrections: “Lift your arms over your head, slightly in front of you, so you could just see your fingers if you looked up” (which you are not allowed to do). Maybe it’s the delight she expresses when for a brief moment we are all balancing on our toes, arms curved overhead, without wobbling or holding onto the barre.
Whatever it is, the class casts a spell. If I were actually five, I’d probably hate it. In fact, at the only ballet class my mother ever took me to when I was about five, the teacher suggested to my mother that I not come back, “She’s definitely athletic but not a dancer.”
I was never the girly type. We have a photograph of a family gathering with my great grandmother in the center and my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins. I’m about four years old, wearing a pink party dress and a long-sleeve flannel shirt underneath. Years later, I asked my mother about it. “You refused to put on your dress. That was the compromise.”
I was upset in third grade when my father made my older brother and his friend Brad stop playing tackle football with me. Flag football only. When I was in sixth grade, my father lectured my brother about not throwing the baseball too hard at me after dinner when we played catch in our yard. So we waited until Pop went back indoors and resumed.
I played tons of sports in high school and played tennis competitively in the 18-and- Unders. People finally stopped calling me a Tom-Boy, but that hardly helped. When I tottered downstairs to our front hall one evening in the 11th grade, wearing a red chiffon dress and black heels for ballroom dancing/etiquette class, which I attended with my older brother, he yelled, “Look, it’s Minnie Mouse!”
I always thought there were boys and there were girls and then there was me, somewhere in the middle. Is that because everyone called me a Tom-Boy? Or something deeper? I was always attracted to guys, so that was that. What was there to think about? I just felt different.
When I was living in Montana in my twenties, I stayed once with two friends my age at their ranch. They were married and their uncle was visiting. I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and had my hair pulled up under a cap. Their uncle, who had recently retired from a lifetime career as a prison guard and wore the steel-toed shoes to prove it, looked at me, looked away and looked back again. He turned to them, “Is that your boy?” I’m not exactly shapely, but still. Did that make me a twelve-year-old boy?
What was this all about? A question of gender identity? Or just a girl who loved sports as a kid and hated dresses?
Does it matter? I don’t know. All I know is for the first time ever I want to be a ballerina. Oh, and I also want to learn how to box. Something else I’ve never done.