I Forced to Accept My Postpartum Body. Then An Unexpected New Hobby Changed Everything. –

For most of my adult life, National Dance Day, which just ended, got a lot of attention from me as National Ballpoint Pen Day. However, this person has changed: I was part of Monday at 2 p.m. Absolutely A beginner adult dance troupe at the Mid-Westchester Jewish Community Center and I haven’t joined yet.

But my desire to touch was born in a dark place. After my second child was born in April 2021, I had postpartum depression. PPD is a complex hormonal and environmental beast that is often misunderstood. For me, it was a combination of moving to the suburbs after spending my entire adult life in the city, combining pandemic stress and isolation and work pressures that led to my call at exactly the same time I entered. my daughter. world.

Add to the new parent the lack of sleep to intensify the hormonal fire – I am completely harmless.

Even though I delivered these heavier feelings to the therapist, I still struggle every day – well, every time – to get a postpartum body. (The constant whirlwind of Facebook ads selling me “ways to get rid of belly racks didn’t help.”)

My story as a dancer also raises the question. From 5 to 18 years old I started on a pre-professional path in ballet, which meant that as a teenager, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I attended six lessons a week to escape many other pleasures of puberty. In search of my dance dreams.

And even though I didn’t fully understand it then, I spent six days a week learning to believe that my body wasn’t strong enough – not strong enough, not skinny enough, less prominent, not focused enough and of course . Not gentle enough.

All the time I’ve danced, I probably haven’t lost 110 pounds 5 feet 4 inches tall, however, in my “curves” (i.e. a woman’s thighs and breasts need more support than a bra ). gymnastics), I can not afford my body It is acceptable in professional dance companies – or so I was warned by kind teachers.

I decided to give it up the other day when a fellow dancer commented in the dressing room that “I looked amazing street Clothes. “I can do it Eventually, after more than a decade of dancing, I realized that my love of ballet was not enough to justify the daily blow to my self-esteem.

It may seem counterintuitive to redefine your relationship with your body, go back to the activity that ruined that relationship in the beginning, but it turns out that dancing – and especially dancing – is exactly what I need to start and deepen it. process. Reconnect.

Over the past five or ten years, dancers have become more outspoken about the need for bodily participation in their art, but I have yet to see a large company like NYCB or ABT as the occasional dancer that doesn’t fit the limited narrative. of dancers as thin and white.

Touch dance, on the other hand, is one of the few dance styles in the West that does not have a culture of weight stigma or age culture. The greatest professional tap dancer started in adulthood and was still on the dance stage in the 1980s.

And so when I Noticing that my local JCC offered a lesson (personally, not in a fucking ‘Zoom!) And that it was a lesson for more ignorant beginners, I took a chance.

In our first lesson, an immediate sense of friendship emerged. The age of the dancers is from 30 to 70, but despite our diverse life experiences and perspectives of generations, we all know we dance with bows.

As a complete beginner, I felt good excuse for failure that didn’t exist in ballet or motherhood. Sure, in both ballet and motherhood I keep making mistakes (my daughter chews on her iPhone charger as I write), but mistakes in this arena are often accompanied by a deep sense of shame, or at least an expectation of self -denial. .

But for at least an hour a week in tapping class I have every right to be awful. And with that permission, I found that instead of thinking about how I would look in the mirror, or if I met an unattainable standard, I focused on how Tried Dance.

At first, I was thankful to be away from home for an activity that didn’t include Pepa Pig. I made this lesson an integral part of my week, something we rarely do as mothers (putting ourselves first) or as human beings (recognizing the importance of prioritizing happy movement for our emotional and physical health). ).

It’s especially healing to have weekly interactions with the same group of women – then referred to as the ‘tap crew’. I was glad to enter the room with people realizing that I was at a tiring stage of life with my little and little kid and that they felt stupid just for visiting.

Not only are we all hungry for this IRL connection after COVID, but in a busy, hectic lifestyle led by most of my millennial friends, this is also the only place I can go where no one will bother me. (No time to test the phone when punching a Maxi Ford Bandstand Boogie.)

Sadness is often faced by new parents because the relationship is so one-sided when your kids are very young, but with the tap crew I was able to share with the group something that is important to all of us. Furthermore, these women are fearless, willing to look stupid when they try something new and always willingly offer unconditional support to their countrymen instead of watching our dance in the prism of competition.

I also began to wonder how my body was moving – in its current shape and size – after two pregnancies and two years. (The main source of my physical activity during the pandemic was food chlorination and attempts to put diapers on babies who had no interest in making diapers.)

Since the touch emphasizes the expression of emotion and character through rhythmic sounds, I wasn’t too focused on the visuals, so it allowed me to develop a better concept of blocking. Instead of constantly worrying about how I’m going to show up to others, my inner monologue is like, “Am I breathing in changing this ball mixture? Ah, let me try to change this rhythm a little bit. yet ”and“ Holy smoke, really all our feet created music together from nothing ?! ”

In ballet, I usually try to join the corps de ballet and take up space as a soloist in a very careful, purposeful and beautiful way. It’s time to hold on, but it often encourages you to listen to music and relax on the steps (remember a movement called Goofus) and generally be as strong as you want.

In fact, one of the most stimulating and liberating aspects of pressing for me is learning to take up more space and produce more sound.

Within a few months I could say I went from “absolute beginner” to “still relatively beginner”, but my outlook on the body changed. I have the unfortunate wall-to-wall mirror in the bathroom where I can check for stretch marks or lift the neck to check my back for fat deposits.

But now that I notice a negative conversation inside, I’m literally saying to myself, “Hey, ma’am, you have two 10kg kids and you still have the energy to do it,” followed by a series of blows. The donkey buffalo went to my morning shower.

At the time, my daughter was obsessed with shoes – throwing them, biting them, offering fragrant tennis shoes to everyone who entered our gym closet – and even my tap shoes is no exception. As I watched this little Carrie Bradshaw / Shirley Temple raise the faucets on the new wooden floor with the joy of abandonment, I realized that for her the body was just a tool to explore and control the world, and it brought him nothing but joy. .

I promised that I would try to have the same attitude and continue to shape this perspective for my daughter as she grows up and becomes more self -aware.

Of course, the faucet did not cure my bodily embarrassment. I admit that this is something I will discuss at length, because no matter what internal work I do, we live in a food -obsessed culture that promotes unnaturally lean and body size is detrimental to morale and health.

But when I went back to dancing, I also realized that my tap group, my friends and my family, especially my kids, didn’t care what Libra was saying. And while I am endlessly proud that I can now ask Shim Sham, the knowledge that I of Rather than the body, what I think, what I have to say and the relationships I have formed, is what defines my essence, this is the worst part of all.

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