Always a Dancer

or...

Trying on a New Outlook
(I was an athlete, part 3)

In early May of 2018 I had pretty much decided that I hated myself. Based on my weight. Which, I knew, was wrong, but that's where I was. Then a few things happened:

• Jason and Adreanna got engaged! (This was the biggest one because it gave me something fun and exciting to focus on.) I spent the summer sewing Adreanna's wedding dress, and making other wedding preparations.
  
  

  

  The lace is hard to see in these pics, but I sewed most of it on by hand. That, along with reception-planning, kept my mind pretty well occupied.

• I read a book called Beautiful Bodies, where the author (who was even crazier about her weight than I ever was about mine) researched "What is the ideal human body?" and "Why do we come in different shapes and sizes, and when and why did we start hating ourselves for it?" She said something that I thought about a lot...which, unfortunately, I can't find now to quote. (So it was important to me a year ago, but maybe I've moved on? It is undoubtedly in the last half of the chapter titled Ending an Era—there's a lot of good stuff in there.)
• Bruce got a job out of town; he was gone from the middle of October until the middle of April.

All of that gave me new and more important things to think about. Here are some things that I realized about myself:

• I actually do like myself—kind of a lot. BUT  when life gets stressful in other areas, I start picking on myself about my weight. It's like, "Things are really bad right now, and you're fat  too." (Is this a way of avoiding the other stresses?)
• At my current size, I can look back on a photo from ten years ago and think, "Oh. I thought I was so fat. If only I looked like that now!" 
• And here is myself ten years ago, looking at a photo from twenty years ago: "If only I looked like that again!" 
• And it keeps going and going. If, by some miraculous freak of nature (not illness), I ever had my teenage body again, would I still be telling myself, "If only I could lose ... pounds"? When does it stop?
• "Would I really be satisfied at — pounds?" is not a new thought. I've wondered that for years, but it still didn't stop the mania.

And here are a few other tidbits I've pondered:

• The beauty and fashion industry is...well, pretty contemptible. They seem to exist to impress one another, constantly moving on to the more and more outrageous (just watch a runway show...). 
• The beauty and fashion industry seem to promote pedophilia, holding up a teenage body, a younger child's complexion, the big eyes of a toddler, and "perfect" hair as the standard of beauty and "sexy" for adult women. And the more skin you show, the better.
• The BMI standard was invented by life insurance companies as a scale for how much to charge people for their insurance. More and more it is being...not disregarded, but looked on as not the best scale.
• Despite my weight and my BMI, I am in really good health. I hardly ever get sick, and my blood labs are always clean as a whistle.

Well, anyway while Bruce was gone last winter he worked with a lady (who happened to be a friend of ours already), and she was very excited about a diet she was doing. She had already lost 50+ pounds, and was a firm believer who was going to stick with this plan forever. (And if it makes her happy, I really hope she does!) So, knowing that I always want to lose weight, he told me—sometime in January?—about the book she loved: Bright Line Eating.

And while we talked about it I realized a funny thing: Somehow over the last eight months I had pretty much made peace with my body. While I still wanted to be smaller, it just didn't seem as important; it certainly wasn't worth beating myself over.

I don't know that I'm up to "beautiful" yet.
"Look pretty good today " is fairly frequent, though.

But I had some interest in what Bruce was saying, so I read the book. Basically the author says that all sugars and all flours should be considered as drugs: if you wouldn't do drugs, don't do flour or sugar either; make up your mind and cut them out of your diet now. She also outlines a meal plan that includes lots of really good foods, and the amounts she thinks you should eat. I know myself well enough to know that I am not going to give up ALL sugar, and ALL flour forever. But her meal plan was interesting, so I thought I'd give it a try—after revamping it a little to fit my flour and sugar habits.

First I weighed myself, and was surprised to discover that I was ten pounds lighter than I was before the holidays! (Stress from Bruce being gone?) Then I planned out two weeks' worth of menus and stuck to them pretty well; I lost about a pound a week. I was pretty happy about this, but I was also starting to dislike the way I was thinking about food, and the amount of  time I spent thinking about it. I just don't want to beat myself up over a slice of bread, or not enough veggies in a day, or (heaven forbid!) a cookie with some milk. I do not want to go there. After a couple of months I would make a week's menu and then not follow it at all—which made me feel stupid because it was my own plan. Eventually, I just fizzled out entirely. And, it turns out, I am pretty OK with that.

There's this mantra that diet people and diet places use to ...motivate? you: Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.  I used to buy into it, but I really don't any more. Because, you know what? Enjoying a treat with my family (especially if the kids make it or buy it) feels pretty good! And chocolate during "that time of the month" is almost a necessity; I'm not going to lie.

Um, not true.

And, overall, I feel pretty good. I'm not the most petite girl in town, but I'm not the most chunky girl either. But that doesn't matter. I do notice body sizes, just like I did way back in my ten-year-old ballet class. But just like then, the other girls don't matter; only I do. And, mostly, I'm feeling OK with myself.

(Let me clarify: the other girls matter to me, but their size does not.)

Am I completely, 100% all better, and non-crazy now? No.
Just yesterday morning I was looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, "Ugh. Blech."  But those feelings are getting easier to brush off.
Would I like to be thinner? Yes, I absolutely would. But not at the price of self-disgust and misery. I'd rather work on the non-crazy part for now.

As for being an athlete: (I did promise to get back to this)...

During my "Need-to-lose-twenty-pounds" days I tried to get some exercise. Walking and running are cheap, but I discovered that
1. I really don't like to just walk or run, and 2. I get shin-splints and plantar fasciitis really easily. I tried doing some dancing at home, but doing it alone, and doing it because it would help me lose weight took all the joy out of it.

On the other hand, when I went to a free tap-dance practice-thing a couple of years ago, that was a lot of fun. In one session it was just me and one other girl. She watched me a bit, and said, "You're a dancer!" Over the years I've had people ask if I'd been a dancer, or tell me that I walked like a dancer, but this time... it meant a lot to me. It was as if ...in her discovery, she recognized me.

I still can't get myself into regular dance classes; they are expensive, and there's really nothing around here for adults. But every now and then I do put on some YouTube videos I've found—ballet barres and jazz warm-ups. I connect them to the big TV in my living room and dance with them. And with most of my kids out of the house I get to play my own music more often so I  can dance in the kitchen while I'm working; it's pretty fun. I've also started stretching as I read my scriptures in the morning, and I'm regaining my flexibility. In fact, when I measured my straddle a couple weeks ago I was only eight inches away from the wall (yes, I measured with a ruler). That's pretty darn good for not having done it in thirty+ years! I still love dancing. It's still in my brain, it's still in my heart, and, apparently, it's still in my body.

I don't think I will ever be an athlete again—not physically. I am glad, glad, glad for the discipline I learned: the strength of body and mind I gained from my teenage years of...athletics. But there's no drive to push myself that hard again, no granite muscles, no more pointe shoes (it's hard to believe I loved those torture-devices), and no teenage body. It's not likely I will ever dance on a stage again either.

But I will always be a dancer.



p.s. In case you were wondering, I have started on the clothes that I bought fabrics for last year; I've made two or three things already, and I've started on another dress. I will post pics when I have them.

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...

I was an athlete, once

A few weeks ago I was thinking...about what? I don't remember. But this thought struck me suddenly and forcefully: I was an athlete!

You might not have thought so back then, in the days when I was athletic. I never played basketball, volleyball or football—I barely understand the scoring in basketball, and the rules of the others are completely beyond my comprehension. I couldn't hit a baseball with a bat—in fact, if any ball comes flying toward me my instinct is to cover my head and duck. I can't even hit a golf ball off of its tee (although miniature golf is fun; I can do that). I can't run—never could run—for long distances; I might have been able to run a short sprint, back in the day.

Nope. To look at me now you would never guess that I was an athlete, and most people looking at me then wouldn't have thought so either. They thought I was a dancer.

Pas de Quatre  from Swan Lake (I'm on the left.)
This still photo doesn't look athletic. 
It looks feminine and it looks graceful... 
But, oh man! was this dance a workout!
(click the link above to see the choreography)

They were right—I was a dancer. I went to dance classes from one to three hours every day, five days a week, and, occasionally, to three-hour rehearsals once a week on top of the classes. I took my dance shoes and my music to school every day and skipped lunch so I could practice tap, jazz, and ballet through the lunch hour. I performed group dances and solos, and I was good! I lived and breathed dancing...

but I was still an athlete.

Yankee Doodle—a military tap dance, where every step
sounded like a drum-roll—and Sugar Plum Fairy;
a small group dance and a solo I earned my way into by skipping lunch. (Gotta love that cheeseburger grin, braces and all!)

I couldn't slam-dunk a ball, but I could jump from a standing position to...about twelve or so inches off the ground. I could jump six to eight inches straight up without a running start or even bending my knees first—just from the strength in my legs, torso, and feet. I could hop across the floor on the ends of my toes. I could lift  my leg higher than my head. I could not only bend down and put my hands flat on the floor (with straight knees), but I could put my hands flat on the floor a few inches behind my feet while I was down there. I could stand on one foot for several minutes while moving my other legs and arms–without falling down. I could spin and I could leap—sometimes I spun and leapt at the same time ;-) (tour jete). And I worked on all these things with blistered feet, through torn muscles, and even a sprained ankle.

This is when I did Kitri's solo from Don Quixote—with 32 beats of toe-hops on a sprained ankle that was
still trying to heal. If you want to see the dance, click this link. (Her jumps are much more spectacular than mine ever were, but, just so you know, my toes actually cleared the floor by about an inch with each toe-hop. Just saying.)

I wasn't a body-builder, but I was lean and strong, and had rock-hard muscles. (A favorite memory of Bruce's and mine is when we were sitting down one time—back when we were first dating—and as he reached for something on the floor his hand bumped into my calf. He told me to relax, and I didn't know what he was talking about. He wanted to know why I was clenching my legs.  (??) When I insisted that I was relaxed and my muscles weren't tightened at all, he told me, "Well, then tighten them!" Disbelieving guy. So I tightened that calf; when he felt it, he exclaimed, "Holy Cow!!" He said my muscles were like granite.) Yep. I worked.

I wasn't "in" to sports; I didn't run track or do hurdles, but I could run and jump for several minutes at a time, only taking long enough breaks to learn the next exercise and start up the music.

I never imagined myself as an athlete back then; I scorned athletes who acted like dance was an easy, girly thing. They had no idea! I worked with my "team". I could be in the right spot at the right time. I did it with a smile on my face—no grimacing or grunting. And I did it all in time to music. (How many football players can say that?) I did think of myself as a dancer. It was only a few weeks ago that the inspiration hit me:  "I was an athlete!"

But that's not the point (the pointe?). The point is that I loved it.

I loved it when I was finally able to execute a double pirouette without tipping over; leaping across the floor like I was flying; doing little jumps, getting higher, and a little higher. I loved the jazz isolations; I loved doing the quick, tricky tap steps. I loved the control I had to make my body do exactly what I wanted it to do. I loved working my muscles until they shook, and then working them a little bit more. I loved being stretched and stretched—in my brain as well as my legs. I loved working until I was sweating and breathless. I loved the stiffness in my body that said I'd been working, and I loved working it out again in the next day's classes. I loved the discipline. I loved my teacher. I loved performing—the absolute magic of being on the stage. I loved moving. I loved the Whole. Thing.

And the point now is that I miss it. It was a huge part of me, and I abandoned it for marriage, children, family, and (sadly) lack of funds. ...Although if I'd had the money for lessons I probably would have spent it for my kids and not myself.

I absolutely do not regret putting my family first—I love my family even more than I loved dancing. And I would do the same thing again without a second thought. And I love the things I do now, too. But I do still miss dancing—I am missing it more lately than I ever have (maybe because my kids are grown up enough to not need all my energy?).

I wonder if that is why I am compelled to be moving and doing and busy all the time––part of the reason that I tear out my walls and rip my couches apart. I know there are days (like last Saturday) when I feel like I will explode if I don't move; when I wish I could leap and spin and run; when I wish I could dance. Unfortunately, in the thirty years that have gone by since last  I really danced, I have become too sedate—I stand in one spot and wash dishes; I stand and cook meals; I sit and sew or write. I no longer have the strength, flexibility, or stamina to even run past two houses. (Or the desire to just run. Bo-ring.)

But I still want to dance.
I want to do it again.
I was an athlete.
I wish I still was.