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“Yes, I heard about that,” she murmured. “Shall we try again? I’d love for her to see her beautiful mother on stage. It’s good for girls to see their mothers as more than just their mothers.”
My eyes stung. “I’d like that, too.”
Later that night, as I took my place on stage, I spotted them at the back of the auditorium. Brayleigh’s wild curls, long since freed from her hair tie, flounced around her small face like a homing beacon.
All the dancers in my group were classically trained. Having been forced to give up ballet for one reason or another, we’d switched to lyrical. For us, the group served as an outlet for bodies deprived of their creative expression.
A volunteer organization, we performed an average of once a month and practiced weekly, except when learning a new routine. Then we practiced obsessively for two weeks to perfect it.
Our routines tonight were tried and true. I let my thoughts wander as the music flowed through me, opening my chest, deepening my breath, clearing the fog in my brain.
Minty’s words reverberated through my mind.
I found the three of them at the back of the church whenever I could. Brayleigh’s little face shone, rapt with attention, her small hands pressed over her rosebud mouth.
Minty watched with a look of both pride and wonder on her usually closed face.
I reached for her with my body, my heart, my soul, to communicate to her my love for my body, my self, when I danced. The love I held for our collective femininity, our female solidarity, that I allowed myself to revel in when the music played. The kindred spirit I sensed within her, the warrior, the witch, the mother, the siren. A celebration of all that we are.
All we could be.
All we could be for each other.
Lucky sat back, his arm around the back of her chair, his attention flitting back and forth between the stage and his girls.
They made a small but beautiful family. Laughter and love radiated from them and had embedded itself in the walls of their home. I basked in it when I was there, just as I had at Lucky’s growing up. At Daniela’s, amid the noise and the chaos, the laughter and jokes, my heart beat with the steady thrum of life that pulsed between all of them.
My home was quiet.
Routine.
Beige.
Tracy and Sean, Lucky and Minty, Dani and Carlos, that sweet, gentle soul a quiet force in his rambunctious household, cherished that illusive connection I so craved.
At one time I thought Darcy had it as well, but somehow it slipped away.
There were no guarantees.
It’s good for girls to see their mothers as more than just their mothers.
Had I ever seen my mother?
The tempo rose and so did we, pushing the emotion out to the crowd, absorbing the energy as it echoed back, then sending it out once again, larger than before, a symbiotic exchange.
The guilt of wanting to be more than just Brayleigh’s mother dissipated as I watched her. She stood on her chair, Minty’s steadying hand at her tummy, Lucky’s at her back, and swayed with the music, her arms lifted in joyful mimicry.
A family.
Small but beautiful.
Laughter, noise, their walls thrumming with life.
I couldn’t give her that.
But.
The warrior. The witch. The mother. The siren.
