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This morning my daughter walked out the door and off to ballet. That may seem like an unremarkable statement. But for us it’s hugely significant. She’s a serious ballet student aiming for a professional career. So that’s meant fourteen years so far of ballet lessons. And that means fourteen years of driving to ballet lessons. And back. And there again. And back. It’s okay, it’s part of going for it: the big goal, the amazing dream. Those times in the car have also been our time to talk: sometimes over silly things, sometimes seat-dancing to music, often about ballet, friends, frustrations, plans, and joys.
But when you have the dual situation of a child deeply involved in an interest, and a home in the suburbs, that means you’re spending an awful lot of time in the car, which corresponds to not spending an awful lot of time out of it. My daughter’s drive to reach her goal is spectacular, and we enjoy doing our part to help her achieve that goal. But it does mean that by necessity we’ve been in a bit of a bubble. She has been in a bit of a bubble: a hard-working, hard-scrabble ballet bubble, but a bubble nonetheless. And the rub is that as she’s excelled and progressed in ballet, she gets thrust further and further away from home, and away from that bubble. She’s already spent summers in L.A., New York, Boston and Miami. This summer she goes to both Chicago and Denmark to dance. And even as I’m completely confident in her ability to do well with her ballet, and to make friends, I’ve paused at the picture of her making her way in a practical way in a very large city, and abroad. Going from ballet to the suburbs back to ballet back to the suburbs had begun to feel like a very poor way to prepare for increasing independence. The jump was too severe and abrupt: I didn’t, after all, even feel comfortable having my daughter take the bus to ballet. And the reasons weren’t all irrational, either: living in relative suburbia meant the bus wasn’t right around the corner. And the neighborhood we lived in had begun to flounder under the weight of a number of worrisome societal issues. There had been incidents, and not few took place at bus stops. Or while young people were walking alone. The very peace and tranquility of suburban neighborhoods can in fact create long lonely stretches of isolation, with nary a person in sight. I have my #metoo stories. All women do. I wasn’t comfortable sending my teen daughter out into a combination of factors that my existence as a woman had trained me to recognize as fraught.
And yet there was a real need to allow more independence; to allow my daughter to get the unfortunate awareness and sixth sense which is necessary to move through the world with a modicum of confidence and safety. Driving in our bubble and then waving goodbye at the airport and crossing my fingers wasn’t the answer.
And so this move downtown, which to many may have seemed a counter-answer to the problem, was as much a reason for our move as any other. If my daughter was going to be living in large cities, I wanted her to already have lived in a city. If she was going to be walking city streets, I wanted her to walk them here, first, from a home base not too far from where she needed to go, and with a mom and step dad not too far away. I’d rather have her walk with purpose down a crowded city street with its many people, cafes, shops and eyes, then down a neighborhood street where no one was home and no one was out. Maybe some people lived on streets where that wasn’t the case, but it was the case on ours. So, on our very first full day in our new apartment, when the time came for my daughter to leave for ballet, she left. Alone. Walking. With a fully-charged phone hooked up to my phone’s tracker, but alone. With a not-too-long walk pre-plotted, and a few talks on possible scenarios fresh in her mind, but alone. With a building key and an apartment key and her ballet bag and her ears free of earbuds. But alone. Walking. On her own.
And I’ve been out there too, no longer tied to my car, alone, walking. With my son, walking. With our dog, walking. And too, when she gets out after dark, with my daughter, walking. No need to throw caution to the wind. But at least we’re taking steps. Literally. To face this world and its men and never forget for a moment that we have inherent vulnerabilities (as women, that’s a permanent knowledge), but that we can take steps to take ownership over that vulnerability. To get a necessary edge. To walk like we own the place: this city in which we’ve chosen to live. This world. Because we all do.
