Maybe I should blame it all on a chain-smoking ex-Rockette… or maybe I should thank her.
She had me at pliés and tendus, but until I stepped into that tiny dance studio wedged into a dusty strip mall three minutes from my parents’ house in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, I didn’t know anything about ballet, only that it sounded like a fun thing for a seven-year-old girl with not a lot of entertainment options.
I didn’t even have a ballet outfit. That first day I wore a gymnastics leotard belonging to my sister.
And then the teacher, the ex-Rockette with the tobacco habit, began to teach, teach what she surely loved even more than her smokes.
“First position!” she called out, clapping her hands.
At that instant, at that clap of the hands, I felt as if I was in the grip of something far greater than I could imagine. Just as suddenly, as if some door in my imagination had been flung open, I knew for certain what I wanted to do: dance.
Dad was the pastor of a medium-sized congregation in Rio Rancho and Mom raised us kids. They never pressured me into dancing, though they supported me completely.
I practiced four times a week, three hours a day, just about every minute I wasn’t doing schoolwork or helping out around the house. I was totally willing to put my whole heart into my dream.
I went to a larger studio in Albuquerque, almost an hour’s drive each way for Mom. She was happy to do it. I think it was because I almost didn’t make it as a newborn. Mom always said the nurse who saved me was a gift from God.
Shortly after I was delivered, an alert nurse noticed I wasn’t breathing properly and whisked me away for emergency surgery. I had a congenital heart defect, which doctors repaired. God had kept me alive then and now I was pursuing my passion. Mom was only too glad to be a part of it.
At age 14 I won a scholarship to a prestigious ballet high school near San Francisco. I was nervous, and homesick. There was pressure. This was a training ground for some of America’s best dancers.
But I held my own and after a few months I wasn’t homesick, at least not too much. I’d call Mom and Dad in the afternoon and talk to everyone. Knowing that God was right there with me made being away from my family bearable.
Then one day my ballet shoes didn’t fit. My feet had seemingly swollen overnight. I noticed my leotard getting tight. Dieting didn’t help. I got heavier, almost bloated, and developed headaches and vertigo.
Finally, after a recital my parents had flown out to attend, the school director asked to talk to my parents. “Unfortunately, Natalie’s body is not developing as we expected,” the director said crisply to my parents. “I’m afraid she’ll have to forfeit her scholarship.”
My parents left the office, more worried than they’d been in a long time. Later they told me what the director had said.
“Honey, I think you need to come home for a while,” Mom said. “It’s not a healthy environment for you right now. The most important thing is to get you in to see your doctor.”
I packed up my things and flew home with my parents. On the plane I leaned my head against the window and stared out. Where are you, Lord? I asked. Why would you let this happen to my body? Did I do something wrong?
Doctors could find nothing wrong. I changed my diet, suspecting I might be allergic to gluten. I got my driver’s license, waking up at five-thirty every morning to go to the gym, then school, then to a ballet studio.
Though I was still ill, I pushed through it. I felt connected again to my dream. Maybe this adversity was designed to strengthen me.
But deep inside of me I sensed hesitation, like a dancer about to attempt a difficult move for the very first time, as if I couldn’t quite bring myself to trust that dream again, to trust God. I prayed for a sign.
Almost immediately something crazy happened: Mom won a trip for two to New York City in a radio call-in contest.
It was magical. We visited ballet studios and saw Lincoln Center, where the New York City Ballet performs. I was psyched enough to apply to ballet schools again. I chose one in Chicago because I’d be able to dance with actual performing ballerinas, almost like an apprenticeship.
Mom and Dad helped me rent a cute little apartment close to the school. I felt like I was living a fairy tale. I was17. I actually get to do what I love! I said to myself.
And then the strange swelling returned, and the dizziness, the exhaustion. This time my school was kind and supportive. In the end, though, four years later, I packed up and headed home…and finally got a diagnosis.
My heart wasn’t beating properly. The swelling and everything else were caused by poor blood flow, a weak heart, not the kind of heart one could put into a dream like mine. A surgeon installed a pacemaker.
I felt better at once. I didn’t know I could feel this good. I returned to Chicago, confident. That’s when the chest pains started and everything ended.
“You contracted an infection in your heart,” my doctor told me, perhaps a result of the surgery. “No dancing, not for a good while at least. You could develop scar tissue or even worse.”
When at last I felt able to get out of bed, I stood up and told God I was done with dancing. I enrolled in a dance history program at the University of New Mexico.
There was a bright spot. I started seeing an old college boyfriend, Adrian, a web analyst who was now living in New York. We got engaged and that made me as happy as anything ever had. Adrian was hoping to move back to New Mexico.
But then the recession hit. There were no jobs to be had. Adrian and I discussed it and felt it was best for him to stay at his job in New York. I’d follow after we were married.
New York. Where I’d gazed in wonder at Lincoln Center and dreamed of performing there. Could I go back and not feel bitter? It would be so easy to see this as a final humiliation, to be so tantalizingly close and yet so far.
We got married and I moved to the Big Apple. Not as a ballerina, as I once thought, but as a young wife not quite sure of the future.
Losing my ballet dream had left a kind of void in my life that ached to be filled somehow. But how? I’d spent my whole life focused on just one thing and now it had been snatched from me.
One morning after Adrian left for work I cracked the window so the street noises could drift up to me, the music of the city, and gazed outside. How did I end up in New York but not a dancer?
It seemed so perverse. I saw dancers on the street all the time, racing around in leotards and leg warmers and big bags on their shoulders.
As my heart healed from the infection, I decided to try a low-key class just for fun. Then another. To my amazement, a lot of my old strength and technique remained.
Something else remained too: that ember of a dream, still glowing in my soul, ignited long ago by a teacher’s clap of her hands. No, I would never be a prima ballerina. My health wouldn’t stand up to the physical rigors. But could I look at my dream with new eyes?
Then I saw a classified ad, seeking teachers for a small ballet academy in Connecticut. I applied. Before I knew it, I had a job teaching kids. My first day at work I stood at the barre gazing at a room full of tiny bodies dressed in tights and leotards, their faces eager and full of hope.
It took me back to my own first day at the ballet studio, to that overwhelming feeling that I was meant to dance. I thought of the wrenching ups and downs of my ballet career.
What if all these years God had been trying to show me that he’d never leave me, never forsake me? That he would keep me connected to what I love?
Now here I was being given the opportunity to pass on my passion for movement, for dance, to these little girls standing in front of me, little girls who needed not only instruction but nurturing. What better place to be?
And, with a sharp clap of my hands, the class began.
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