There were moments when I was dancing, brief glimpses of feeling euphoric, rapturous. Aware of the momentum of my body carrying me through space, trusting without thinking. Those moments were enough to spur me on to continue with ballet, learning the vocabulary and diligently molding my body to be able to do the extraordinary things I saw Moira Shearer do. The image of her perfect passion was emblazoned on my memory.
I was an odd child in hindsight. I had notions about things that only made sense from the way they made me feel, defying all logic. Like I refused to get my hair cut for a long time, wild curly hair so unruly and feral that my mother insisted on the compromise of fashioning it into tight braids after I came home on a few occasions with burs or tar she had to meticulously cut away from the entangled mess. Larry who sat behind me in second grade, and the one responsible for the tar incident, used to pull my braids when the teacher turned her back and I ended up standing in the corner many an afternoon for talking, simply for daring to defend myself.
Like Samson, I guarded my long locks convinced that those with short hair instead, had theirs stuffed inside their head. And the thought of that made me feel claustrophobic, unable to breathe. I was certainly smart enough to realize that this notion was ridiculous, but I was also so connected to my body intuition that reason didn't win out until much later. Being called "witchy" one too many times though, led me to the fateful day when I was nine when I ordered all of it to be lopped off in a swift act of defiance.
Staring in the mirror with a bowl cut just above my earlobes in place of my hip-length curly mop, was the single most shocking sight in memory. Nowhere to hide, I felt naked in the world. Once again, it was hard to breathe, requiring cathartic connection to my body, only after which I could think clearly. Though the bike ride felt like my head was a balloon and I missed my thick braids whipping in the wind, I made my peace with my new image, mostly of necessity.
Nothing to do but persevere, now the focus changed to strangers wondering if I was a girl or a boy. Skinny, tomboyish and far from developed, my feelings of being a misfit revived once again. But ever the chameleon, I deftly flipped the dialectic back to being a "chosen one" with this as my newfound image for the role. I imagined I was chic and defiant, unique and far from ordinary.
So by the time I was 11 when I discovered my dancer self, I was up to the challenge. Neither family nor friends felt passionate about much of anything, least of all becoming a dancer. But I was used to being a rogue, or at least in my own mind, all the while adeptly straddling the realms between conforming and deviating. It was a dance I would dance my whole life, leaning in and pushing back. I had finally found my niche.
Eleven was a monumental year for me. There was dancing, but there was also a drastic change in my body. Keep in mind, in 1963 there was no internet, so I was caught completely unaware when I was riding my bike and started to feel something unfamiliar. It was kind of like a stomach ache, but lower. And dull, not like eating too many raspberries from the backyard. When I rode home and went to the bathroom, blood! Something was terribly wrong. Luckily my mother was home and she quickly gave me a "pad" with a very uncomfortable belt thing to hold it up.
I still didn't get it when my mom led me into her bedroom with a book in hand and proceeded to show and tell of the most unfathomable and disgusting things that men and women do with each other that are supposedly normal. And now that I was "having my period" it would be possible for my body to do them too. I was blindsided. There are no words to describe my horror. And even the subsequent lecture on Christian celibacy before marriage, was too short-sighted for my taste.
A friend of mine had told me that the way men and women had babies was that they rubbed up against each other and then the man peed on the woman and she got a baby in her stomach. I paid it no mind at the time as boys were just a nuisance to me. Always killing helpless creatures for the fun of it and trying to look up the girls' skirts, I had no patience for their shenanigans. But when my mother crossed the line and showed me pictures and diagrams of genitals and babies, all I could think was, "I will never, ever do that in my whole life.", No matter what.
It took me a while to recover. The thought of this nasty inconvenience once a month for pretty much the rest of my life was a dirty trick beyond imagining. And if it was an unpleasant interruption to an otherwise good day now, the thought of how many more days like this I had in store for me when I did the arithmetic, almost sent me into a tail spin. And for nothing. I certainly wasn't going to have children nor ever engage in the "dirty deed". Ever.
Then one night lying on my bed studying for a science test, I felt a new sensation. Down there. It felt like the flip side of the achiness of having my period and when I touched myself the pleasure amplified. Suddenly I felt a wave of responsiveness unlike anything I had ever felt before, and I liked it. From then on, just about every time I had to sit still for a long time studying anything, I felt the same longing in my body. As I had thoroughly dismissed the religious beliefs of my childhood, I embraced yet a whole other dimension of my body. Sinful or not, it was a powerful force.
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