The Dark Side of Dance

...Or maybe it's really:

The Dark Side of Me
(I was an athlete, part 2)


I told you that I loved everything about dancing, but it's not entirely true. There was one thing that worried me so much that it has continued to plague me for my entire life.

You must understand that I wanted to dance so, so badly... When I was really little...maybe six years old? ...my mom had me enrolled in a little dance class at a place in Kearns.

This is the place! It had a red roof back then.

I remember wearing a fabulous hot-pink, long-sleeved, satin leotard trimmed with hot-pink fringe, doing a tap dance in our recital to The Charleston  (not the real song, but a little sing-along song.)

But what I remember most about that class, way back when, is the day we were learning to do split-leaps (for the "ballet" portion of the class). The first time I did one, I knew it was perfect. In my six-year-old mind I executed a perfect split, way up in the air, and jumped past the mark that the teacher told us to reach. And after I did it, and I knew it was perfect, my teacher confirmed it! She even asked me to do it again to show the other girls. And that day I went home and told my mom all about it. (I probably showed her, too. :-) )

That little class was just a blip in my dancing career. I wanted to keep doing it more and more; I was dying to dance!

I didn't have another dance class until I was ten. My mom told me she'd signed my sisters and me up for dance lessons with a teacher who used to dance with Ballet West! I was beyond excited; I hardly slept the night before my first ballet class, and went through school that day in anticipation of something wonderful. And it was wonderful! I was so thrilled! We stretched, and we learned a couple of barre exercises, and how to point our feet, and all about good posture... And the next day at school I told—and showed—everyone around me how great it was, and  how you were supposed to stand and have a "perfectly straight" back, etc.. I probably babbled. :-)

I hung on every word LeAnn told us, and soaked it all up, and made it part of me. So when we were standing in class a few weeks later and she told us that dancers had to be tall, and they had to be thin... We couldn't do much about how tall we were going to be—even she was short for a dancer—but we should always stand as tall and straight as we could. And we should work on being "thin" and careful about our weight. And I knew—I knew she was talking directly to me. I was too fat to be a dancer.

Before that I didn't think about how tall or short, or fat or thin I was. I was just a kid, doing my thing.

This is me at the beginning of 5th grade, ready to go on
the Mill Hollow camping trip with my school class.
I did not think I was pudgy. (Heh. I look younger than 5th grade!)

Of course LeAnn was not talking right. to. me. But in my ten year old mind, she was. I remember looking around at the class, and seeing the other girls and thinking, "Well, she is bigger than I am..." But it didn't matter. The other girls didn't matter; I was too fat. And from then on I wanted to lose weight.

after fifth grade, and my first year of dance lessons
I am the third from the left; not the most chunky girl,
or the most petite. And it looks like I had a little growth spurt...Yay! I was taller!

At ten and eleven years old I only wanted to lose some weight...I didn't have a number in mind; I just wanted to be thin enough to be a ballerina. I got my first training bra and my first pair of pointe shoes when I was eleven—on the same day. Exciting! A few years later I still loved dancing on pointe, but I began to hate my "huge" bust.

age 14  Just look at that belly poking out! (What?!) 
And, in a B-cup, my "jiggling" body became my nemesis.  Oh, for Pete's sake!

And LeAnn continued to lecture about it. In class we were told how thin dancers should be; how lean, tight, and non-jiggling. ("Mr. C. used to say, "'When I tell you to stop moving, I mean everything stops moving!'" I heard that one a few times. Truth spoken in jest?)

Between classes LeAnn's mother, who did the office work for the studio, regaled moms (and listening students) with stories of how the director at Ballet West put all the ballerinas on a diet...except for LeAnn, who was supposed to eat a candy bar every day. By the time I was fourteen I was at the dance studio from about 4:30 to 10:30 every night, taking my own classes, and playing the piano for the other ballet classes. I heard these stories, many, many times. And I heard about how you had to be thin not only in my classes, but in all the classes I played for.

That's "too short"—but very thin—LeAnn on the left.
Melanie (pregnant with her second baby) is in the center, and I'm on the right—age 18.
Oh, how I loved this!

On my breaks I would look at Dance Magazine and women's magazines. I read a lot of diets, and spent a lot of time looking at "perfect" bodies, makeup, and fashion. By age fourteen I started skipping breakfast—except maybe a glass of milk—and dancing through lunch instead of eating. Between school and dance times, I might have a sandwich, then I spent the evening at the dance studio. I would have a good dinner when I got home, tired and hungry. Of course I didn't know that this was probably the worst way to lose weight.

When I was about sixteen LeAnn did a terrible thing: She posted a weight chart on the wall, stating how much a ballerina should weigh. At five-foot-three, I should have been 101 pounds...at the most. My "granite-muscled" body weighed a whopping 120 pounds. But the worst of it was that she weighed us once a week and recorded it in a notebook. It was mortifying! It also gave me a number to fixate on: I needed to lose twenty pounds. And I thought thirty would be better.

I am eighteen here—a horse in the Carousel Waltz.
And I am wishing I was thirty pounds lighter—that tiny, little bit of belly that you can almost see
had me convinced.

It wasn't just LeAnn. I auditioned for a class at the University of Utah, and was placed in the adult class—the people who were there just for fun. My teacher in that class couldn't figure out why I didn't get into one of the classes with up-and-coming dancers my age; she attributed it to my weight. I was having lessons with her the year I had my jaw surgery. With my mouth wired shut I lost ten pounds, and then she said I looked perfect. My first year in college (at eighteen, not forty-three, years old) I got onto a dance team with the stipulation that I lose some weight.
Yep. I already knew it.

No, I can't blame it all on LeAnn. In fact, I loved LeAnn; I still do. She was a great teacher—really a great teacher, and she was a fair employer, and she was my friend. But when you add her pressure about weight to tremendous desire to be a dancer, and to all the other societal pressures on girls to be thin...
(I remember being in 8th grade and hearing girls complaining about weighing 110—they were so fat...they needed to lose weight. I had already settled at 120; I was not about to speak up. I was humiliated when, in high school, I heard a boy say that he weighed 120. I don't know if he was complaining or bragging; I only knew that I should not weigh the same as a boy.)
This weight thing was a big. fat. deal.

So here I am, five years after high school, in my bridal photo. By then I wasn't dancing any more...hm... and I'd started eating like a normal person...and I had gained twenty pounds. Horror!

Age 22, and still "needing" to lose thirty pounds...

Here I am, one year after I had Michael, my first baby:

Look at me, "needing" to lose at least twenty pounds.

After I had  few babies, I pretty much decided if I could just lose twenty pounds thatwould be...good enough. Although I still would have loved to get back to 120.

in 2000
I was just barely pregnant with Kaylie, although I didn't know it yet. I "needed" to lose twenty pounds.

in 2011 (showing off after I had my hair cut...and straightened for the day) "Needing" to be twenty to forty pounds lighter.

in 2017, after Ryan's graduation
The most I've weighed in my life...only ten pounds less than my heaviest pregnancy. Wishing I could lose as much as fifty pounds, although even twenty
would be nice... a good start.

I look at those last pictures and I like them! I think I look pretty good. But that's not how I felt about myself, and how I felt is the material point.

Even though I gave up dancing, I couldn't give up "needing" to lose weight. I had realized one day, at seventeen years old—I knew in my bones and my heart—that once I finished at LeAnn's studio I was not going to be a dancer. I would probably rarely dance on stage again, if ever. That was not going to be my life. I cried in my car that day before I went home from the studio. But that knowledge didn't keep me from forever wanting a dancer's body...or at least a thinner one. It was too deeply ingrained, and taught too forcefully when I was too impressionable.

Still...even though I had the pressure from my dance teachers, and pressure from society in general, and even, on occasion, heard my mom talking about how fat so-and-so had gotten, the real blame for my obsession with my weight must rest squarely. on. me.

So fast-forward through the years: With each baby I never did lose all of my pregnancy weight. I tried; I wanted to lose my "baby fat"—and more. I worked on a few diets over the years, successfully losing up to eighteen pounds, only to gain them back—plus five—each time. The lack of funds which kept me from taking dance classes also convinced me that Loralee could make do with very little. If the choice was a new, cute shirt for me, or the same thing for one of my kids, it was an easy decision: the kids got the new clothes. New mascara, or a pound of hamburger? No-brainer. So I stopped wearing makeup; I stopped wearing jewelry (when my little girls lost the contents of my jewelry box), and I only bought new clothes for myself out of dire necessity. And it was mostly OK because I was taking care of my family.

The part that wasn't OK was the way I was starting to feel about myself: I was fat and frumpy. Pretty soon I didn't need to choose between something for myself or something for the family: I only got new clothes for myself when the old ones were really unusable or I really just couldn't stand them any more. After years of this, if I was dying for new things, I'd go try on something at the store and feel so ...repulsed by my size that I actually caught myself thinking "I don't deserve new things."  I knew this was so, so wrong, but I couldn't break out of it.

I tried: I'd heard that instead of focusing on your weight you should focus on the things you do like about your body, but the only things I really liked about my body were my blue eyes, and my curly hair. Those didn't carry me very far. I probably should have thought of the things I can do: I can sew...really well. I'm a great cook. I think, maybe, I had a little something to do with the eight amazing, phenomenal kids that surround me. I'm a decent writer. I graduated with a 3.98 GPA in college, as an adult, with eight kids at home. I'm a very good pianist and a fair organist. There's more...  And I love the things I do; I love that I think I can pretty much do anything I want, and I am pretty much right. I'm kind of awesome that way. ;-)

So I never looked in the mirror and said, "I hate myself." I couldn't do that because I actually love the things I do. But how many times I have looked in the mirror and said, "I hate my body!" (or "my stupid body") ...As if my body was a separate thing. I mean, really... How can I think that I hate my body, and not hate myself?  We—my body and I—are kind of one and the same. (Bruce is the one who kept me from being entirely, 100% crazy-nutso: he is amazing, and I have no doubt that he loves everything about me!)

Anyway, here's where I was about a year ago:

• I'd spent years wanting to believe that a number on the scale didn't—or at least it shouldn't—matter, but I didn't believe it. 
• Eventually I decided that I probably wasn't ever going to change that too-big number. 
• In a moment of enlightenment I started thinking that part of the problem was my clothes: cheap jeans and cheap T-shirts mostly, that fit when they were new, but always managed to stretch or shrink to make me feel uncomfortable and ...just wrong in my clothes.
• I thought maybe if my clothes felt better on me, I would feel better about myself. (After all, once I got away from the mirror and started doing things I didn't usually think about my weight...unless my clothes felt wrong.) 

croquis,
not me 

So last spring I decided I was going to buy fabrics and design myself a new wardrobe, one that would fit well, and flatter me at the size I was. I was pretty excited about this plan. I was going to hold my breath, jump in, and splurge on myself. I ordered some pretty fabrics and started trying to draw designs. But I didn't want to draw on a fashion croquis, because nobody will ever look like that—not even a supermodel, and definitely not me.

I tried tracing a photo of my own body so I could design clothes specifically to look good on me... Mistake! I couldn't stand to see my body on the page. And that's when my fever hit its high point: In my bedroom, seeing myself in the mirror, seeing my drawing, in angry, frustrated self-loathing, I threw my pictures into the trash and I cried, "I don't want to design for that!!"

That...thing. That separate, saggy, lumpy, frumpy, fat thing that I loathed: my. own. body. Mentally it was a dark, ugly place to be. It was depressing. My fabrics started arriving, and that was depressing too. I knew I needed to figure this out, change it somehow...


And now this has been a super long post, and it's ending on a very low note. (That's how the second act always goes, right?) But there's still more to this long, long tale...