Yesterday, I watched my 13 year old daughter do one of the hardest things she has ever done.  She took a dream and made it real, while at the same time saying goodbye to something she holds so dear to her heart it pains me to think about it too deeply.

Emma is a dancer.  She has been twirling around things since she was able to get her tiny feet stable underneath her, moving to music that sometimes only she heard – but always moving.  The funniest thing?  She was our clumsy kid.  I never knew a child so prone to tripping over her own feet, and her special talent?  Landing on her face.  Always.  We had more trips to the dentist to check out her front teeth than any parent should have.

But once we enrolled her in dance class?  That clumsy child disappeared.  She went from being this tiny little thing that would stand in the audience of her older sister’s dance recital, shaking anything on her body she could move, to this graceful little dancer who would give anything to have a tutu.

One of the best parts of our dance experience was the fact that both our girls were taking classes at the same studio I had danced at as a young girl. I had spent many hours being instructed by the same woman who taught my girls, and as they got older and she retired, her daughter, whom I had also danced with, became their primary instructor.  It was family & something we all loved.

As Emma advanced, she was asked to join the studio’s competition team, and we were thrilled – a bit leary of it, as we knew it would be some tougher work, longer class hours and to be honest, we weren’t sure how competition and dancing would mix for her.  But she wanted to give it a try – and she never looked back.  More hours?  Bring it!  Harder skills?  Yeah!  You want me to what??  No problem… just give me a minute.  No matter what was asked of her, she’d give it a go – and we began to see that not only did she try, but she excelled.  Her hard work paid off, and we began to see her turn into this tall, graceful, athletic being on stage that made my husband and I turn to ourselves and say, “Seriously??  We made that?”  Sure, I had danced, but I’m not sure I was ever really a dancer.  I loved it, but it never really lived in my soul, something I breathed the way it began to in our youngest child.

The hard part?  With this love of dance came the desire for more… and not in the competition world.  She began to want more ballet, more technique, more pointe.  She loves jazz (and honestly is ridiculously good at it), tolerates tap – but it is ballet that she really lives for.  Strong, beautiful, lyrical dancing.  I would find her occasionally curled in a ball, listening to music, looking at pictures or videos of dancers at different ballet companies, and the conversations would start – and they all ended the same way.  If this was what she truly wanted, then changes would have to happen.

And so yesterday – they did.

We visited a ballet studio over the weekend that we believe can give her what she wants – HOURS of ballet a week, more pointe instruction, more technique. Advanced jazz & tap, even modern/contemporary, but mostly… ballet.  She loved how hard the class she took seemed, she was enthralled by watching a class that had 16 and 17 year old primary dancers, absolutely thrilled by how much she was going to have to work. Crazy, right?  Not for this kid. She might not want to do her homework, moans about laundry and housework, rolls her eyeballs mightily at some of the things we ask her to do – but work up a sweat for 3 or 4 hours, twisting and turning her body into multitudes of insanely crazy positions, holding an arabesque longer than should be humanly possible, or practicing fuetes and heel drops until I’m dizzy just watching her?  That’s our girl. Nothing was too hard to work at.

With this love of dance & the knowledge of what this studio could offer her, she had a choice to make, and so did we.  She couldn’t have both – and either way, it would hurt.

Not surprisingly, she made the harder choice.  I don’t know, maybe she’d say it was the easier one, being able to look forward to dancing the way she’d been dreaming of.  But the tears in her eyes as we talked to her teacher and friend at our home studio – the way her voice would catch as notes from her teammates started to roll in once they’d heard the news – I don’t know.  She left a familiar, comfortable world where she knew her place, knew her role, knew what was expected of her – and most importantly, knew she was loved – to venture out into a world where she knows no one, armed with only the fact that she knows what she wants.

To dance.

Imagine… learning to make hard choices from your child.  Just goes to show that you’re never too old to learn, never too young to start.  I just hope that as both our lives move forward, we remember this and always choose to go for the dream – you never know how far it will take you, and I hope hers takes her as far as she wants it to.

Now to just learn to ignore the constant sound of pointe shoes on our hardwoods…