Dancing Parents = Dancing Daughter
Not Always!
For a dance teacher, having a child who chooses not to dance seems unthinkable—but this teacher’s story proves it’s not.

From the moment my husband and I found out that we were expecting a baby girl, we had visions of this wonder child dancing her life away. After all, she was the product of not one, but two dancing parents, so what else would she do with her life?

After she was born, we would look at those precious feet and strong legs and glow with pride as we thought of the roles she would undertake.

When she was old enough to walk and mimic a pointed foot, how happy we were that she had good feet and a great arch—a dancer’s feet! How lucky she was!

Oh, happy day—she was 3 years old, and we couldn’t wait to enroll her in dance class. Needless to say, at dress rehearsal we went armed with every camera we owned—and, of course, a video camera. We even brought friends to cover every angle so that we wouldn’t miss a photo op. (Aren’t all parents alike?) On recital night we got tickets for everyone we knew who had agreed to come and see the next Ginger Rodgers or Cynthia Gregory, believing full well that she could be either. The show was great and our daughter was adorable. OK, maybe she wasn’t the best in the class, but remember—she was only 3.

In the blink of an eye, she had turned 7 and was taking two classes a week, tap and ballet. She was definitely on her way to stardom! Except for one small thing: She enjoyed her dance classes but didn’t seem to have the love for dance that we expected. Not to worry, we thought—she was only 7.

After a year or so we added jazz to her repertoire; after all, she had to be a well-rounded dancer. Because she had such great feet and good turnout and a mother who desperately wanted her daughter to be a ballerina, she started taking classes from a former Bolshoi ballerina. Certainly this would bring out the passion for dance that I knew was in her—somewhere.

Her preteen years came, and still the burning desire for dance had not surfaced in our daughter. She did have a burning desire for tennis, though, and would crawl out of bed on Saturday mornings at 6 AM to ice skate—but she really did not have the desire to dance. She would go to class and enjoy it, and she liked dancing in the school show but. . . Maybe it was being a preteen—there was still hope!

By the time she was 16, her passions for tennis, crew, and debating were in full swing, but when she would say, “Oh, it’s Monday; tomorrow is dance,” it was spoken not with excitement but with dismay. Then one night at dinner she mentioned that she thought dancing had skipped a generation in our family. Where had we failed as parents? How could this be? We had tried to raise an independent young woman who could make her own choices— how could she not choose dance?

She quit! We would never see her as a Rockette or dancing Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, but we did see her as a happy, confident young woman on the tennis court, as coxswain of the crew team, and as a leader in her sorority and in her college. We saw her run a marathon to raise money for AIDS research, and we watched her reach out to help others through her job with Americorp.

All the years of dance did pay off. She is a beautiful woman with stamina, discipline, aptitude, and grace. She has a love for the arts, including dance. Now at age 23, she takes dance classes and loves every minute. Funny how life has its twists and turns.

So in the end, we had not failed. And who knows? Maybe her daughter will be the next Margot Fonteyn!

Reprinted by permission from Goldrush Magazine - July 2004