My 12-year-old niece is coming for a visit soon. She’s a recreational ballet student so it’s not clear whether pointe shoes are in her future. And yet she is fascinated by them. She asked whether I might have an old pair she could try on when she is here. I don’t have such a pair, and I don’t for reasons that I’d like to unpack a bit.
My mother had saved a pair of pointe shoes for me that she believed were my first pair of pointe shoes. In fact, they were my last. I hadn’t thrown them out when I quit ballet because they were not yet worn out. They were expensive and custom made (Freed’s) and they held, at least for a little while, the door open to the possibility that I might one day return to pointe after my injury and breakdown.
My mother kept them and kept them and kept them. She kept the shoes through my college years, through law school, through my years as a stay-at-home mom, through my years as a Philosophy PhD student, through my years as a divorced philosophy professor. One by one she gave away my childhood art projects, my costumes, most of my books. But she held onto these shoes even when all hope had passed of my ever returning to ballet.
Finally, my mother brought them to me at Christmas during a downsizing move for my parents. She thought I might want them, she said, but I think she brought them to me because she couldn’t bear to throw them out herself. Somehow, perhaps, they represented the past world of Aili in ballet that she held a long-burning candle for in her heart.
I get it. My mother had a cello from her Youth Orchestra days that used to stand by the piano in our East Harlem apartment. She opened it or played it only once or twice that I can recall and would quit in frustration at her rustiness. One day she decided to donate it to a friend’s child who was taking cello lessons.
I never told my mother this, but I grieved a little to see her cello go. It represented something of her past that I knew was precious. The cello had rested on her shoulder; it’s wide base between her long-skirted knees. Her fingers had pressed its strings and she had bent over it intently, hair in braids, eyes intent upon the music in front of her. I could see her playing it in my mind’s eye, a moving image of the black-and-white photo we had of her playing cello at Kinhaven music camp. Undoubtedly it had molded to her body with her own style of playing, much like my pointe shoes molded to my own feet. These instruments, cello and pointe shoes, were part of our youth, part of our growing up as budding artists, part of our embodied histories.
I no longer have the pair of pointe shoes that my mother gave to me. I sent them to Good Will in a bag with the handmade black velvet cloak, with a hood lined with white satin, that my mother’s mother (the original Aili) had worn on a steamer ship crossing to Europe in the late 1930s. That cloak, too, was a part of our history. That, too, was something that was once labored over, once loved, once saved and cherished, but that could (now) be let go.
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
Leave a Reply