Hello again dear “readers” (all zero of you)! It has been more than seven years since I updated my ballet blog! Much has happened since my last post in March 2019:
I got married that year in July. In the month before the wedding, I signed up for a Barre studio across the street from our apartment; I did that instead of ballet (maybe my studio was on summer break?). I went all the time and I remember at one point getting a correction because I was doing a ballet arabesque and I was not supposed to turn out or something. So silly. “Barre” is an ugly distortion of ballet, an abomination, and I do not endorse it! It’ll get ya fit though, I guess.
I’m not sure why I abandoned this blog when I did, because I resumed real ballet classes after the wedding. Maybe I just got busy. I did travel a lot: our honeymoon in the Caribbean, I went to Boston for work, and then I went to Paris over Thanksgiving on a big family trip with my in laws. In Paris I saw the Paris Opera Ballet perform Raymonda!! It was so beautiful. I saw a blog post somewhere about what it’s like to dance Raymonda in the principal role and it was like “this kills the ballerina” haha. In the airport on our way home from Paris, I got stopped by French immigration officers and grilled about what I did while in Paris to make sure I wasn’t some kind of spy or terrorist. They were like, oh you saw a ballet? What was the plot? I was like ummmmmmm something about an engagement and then a kidnapping??? Luckily I was allowed on the plane.
In early 2020 I was burning out at my job as a writer for a university marketing department, so I quit and gear-shifted my career down to the level of secretary. I probably didn’t have brain space for the blog before I did that, because of the burnout. Just when I solved the burnout problem and started my new job, of course COVID hit.
My last outing out in the world before quarantine was actually to the ballet: Atlanta Ballet performing a show called Heart/Beat that featured a live gospel choir. It was also a mixer for adult students but I don’t think I talked to anyone (of course).
During the first months of COVID, I took a zoom ballet class faithfully, every week, from my sister’s dance teacher in Wilmington. That’s also when I realized I could give myself a ballet class by finding ballet class playlists on Spotify and making up simple combinations for each track (always helpfully labeled with the corresponding exercise).
Then in summer 2020, as the pandemic raged on, I got pregnant. I felt sick and tired for the entire first trimester so I stopped the zoom ballet classes. We also bought a house and moved! Exciting but exhausting times. Once I was feeling better, I resumed the Spotify self-guided ballet classes.
My son was born in April 2021. I remember going to a ballet class in person not long after and wearing a mask the whole class and feeling uncomfortable because I was still breastfeeding.
In the next couple of years, just because of finances and scheduling and parenting (I quit my job altogether and became a stay at home mom after my son was born), it was easier for me to 1. Make it to a weekday morning hip hop dance class at the YMCA while my son was in his half-day preschool and 2. Make up feelings-dances in the evenings in my bedroom at home. So I didn’t take many ballet classes but I was dancing a lot and actually got into pretty good shape because of it!
In the summer of 2024 I got pregnant again, and again had a very rough first trimester (and then some!) so I stopped taking my hip hop dance classes (and we subsequently cancelled our Y membership as it sat unused for months). I did some feelings-dances while pregnant but mostly I just walked a lot to stay in some kind of shape.
My daughter is now 14 months old (my son is FIVE!) and I am happy to report I am managing to fit ballet classes into my life again! Or, well, I have been to two classes so far. My husband has been very encouraging, and a saint at wrangling both kids during dinner/bath/bedtime, while I take class in the evenings.
Things are different post-covid and after so many years away. The schedule is a little more sparse and NONE of my former teachers (Taylor, Calla, Terese and Harmony) teach at my studio anymore. I did see Calla is working more on the admin side of things now, and Harmony is teaching at a different company, but I don’t know what happened to Taylor or Terese! Taylor is probably in the young kids parenting grind herself as she was pregnant towards the end of my classes with her. Terese seemed so established, I’m surprised her class vanished. Covid did crazy things to everyone’s lives, though. Maybe she moved away or something.
Well that’s enough speculation, and enough recapping of the past seven years of my life! When I returned to class for the first time a few weeks ago, I had this urge to write about it but didn’t know where/how, because I’d forgotten this blog exists! I know nobody reads it but that’s okay. It’s still the perfect place to send my ballet thoughts, accomplishments and woes out into the void! I’ll make a separate post about returning back to class. See ya soon, void!
