Kitchen Bikes

That Time We Took Ballet

I signed Roan up for quite a few classes at our YMCA last year.  He's hit the age where most of the classes are drop off, so I can drop him off at art or soccer or whatever for 45 minutes and hang out with Ilan.  Over the summer I wanted something to do on Wednesdays.  There were, I'm not kidding, about 18 ballet classes offered, and nothing else.

Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but as the mother of two boys, I have to admit to some frustration.  Our local YMCA offers more ballet classes than *any other class.*  For example, there are more ballet classes than art, soccer, track, theater, and creative movement combined.  This seems particularly unfair, since ballet is mainly for girls.  We live in Brooklyn, where everything is overcrowded, and you've got all these kids who want to take classes, and so you offer tons and tons of the one class that's geared towards only one gender?

Naturally I've complained about this to other moms, who all encouraged me to put Roan in ballet. They all know or have heard of boys who took ballet, and if they had boys themselves, or a Y membership, or whatever, they wouldn't hesitate for one single second to sign their son right up.  Some moms are more aggressively liberal - what's my problem, they want to know?  This is Brooklyn!  Aren't we all above gender norms here?!  It's not like he'd be the only boy in class, they say.

So I signed Roan up for ballet. There were 7 other kids in his class.  All of them were girls.  Girly girls, who showed up every week in pink and purple tights, leotards, and tutus.  There wasn't a single tomboy or gender neutrally dressed girl in his class.

I bought Roan a wife beater and dressed him in his tightest shortest shorts, because it just seemed wrong, in the face of all that skin tight gear, to have him show up in cut offs and a baggy shirt.  I honestly thought he would enjoy ballet, the structure of it, being told what to do.  We'd tried those free form run-around-like-a-crazy-person classes, and Roan was not on board.  But he didn't take to ballet.  He spent his time huffing around the perimeter of the room, pretending to be a train, and when the teach gave him a choice between participating and watching quietly from the wall he chose to watch.

After a few classes we stopped going.  Roan could take it or leave it, but I began to feel like we were crashing a party.  There was a real sense of camaraderie among those girls, all dressed up like princesses and excited to prance around.  I think it spoiled the atmosphere to have a boy running around on a track no one else could see, hooting and hollaring and screaming "ALL ABOARD THE POLAR EXPRESS!"  Or sitting in the corner, like a delinquent, watching.

I guess I have a new appreciation for these sort of gender segregated classes.  It's nice for girls to be girly with other girls, and if my son isn't asking me for a tutu and ballet flats there's no reason I need to put him in that environment.  We are still baffled by the sheer number of ballet classes and still waiting for the Y to offer a class called "Pretend to be a Train."  Until then, we'll stick with art.

A Few of My Favorite Things

My baby on tippy toes

His floppy ears

This moose face he makes all the time

Roan in his wetsuit

When Roan tells me the moral of a story.  The other day he said, "do you know what the point of WALL-E is?  It's that we need to take out the trash."

Today he summarized the Purim story.  "It's just about a bunch of Jews.  There are a bunch of Jews, and a king."

And when Roan tries to teach something to Ilan.  Roan spent much of Wednesday trying to teach Ilan to have rhythm.  "When you hear music, you clap the beat like this.  The beat is the rhythm.  No Ilan, that is not right.  Okay Ilan, good clapping, you are a clever baby, but you have to clap when I clap, like this."  And on and on and on.