When my daughter was small enough to fit on my lap – able to hold up her head and sit up but not yet walk away from me – I would play music and move her legs and arms up and down to the beat. I wanted her to hear the rhythm, to feel it in her body, to move naturally in music the way people who grow up with music often do.
I did this with my son, too, but since he was the younger one, and I was chasing his toddler sister around before she fell down the stairs, there was less time for lap rhythm-making. One morning while brewing coffee I looked over to where he was playing with some cars and blocks on the floor, though, and saw his little upper body swaying. He was humming to himself as he played, and his torso moved back and forth to his tune.
That feels so long ago now, back in the dark ages of my life with my kids when I believed that I could control what happened to them in the world, that I could control their creative possibilities for the future. It was back in the days when I believed that I did know it all, and that I always knew best. I don’t think that anymore.
My children are young adults now, getting less young every day as we all are, and they can both feel music and dance inside it as I had hoped. The music they listen to, however, eludes me. It eludes me and excludes me. I cannot feel all their new music’s rhythms nor understand them. “That’s ok,” my children say. “It’s not for you.” They don’t try to persuade me, and they don’t try to teach me how to move my body to the new music. It’s not for me draws a dividing line between my generation and theirs. One that makes me feel uneasy and a little sad.
Like many changes in technology, such as the more advanced video games, I feel that I am missing out. That I’ve been left behind. I feel this even though the time I would spend playing video games is curled up with beloved old books that my kids’ generation do not read anymore. With all the dance training I once had, I should be able to do as simple a thing as “twerk” right? Wrong. “Bend your knees and just let your butt jiggle like it wants to, Mom.” My butt doesn’t want to do anything of the sort. What I do looks more like the controlled pelvic thrusting of the jazz dance routines I once knew or Jane Fonda videos of the 1980s.
When I feel left out like this, like a relic of the past, I turn on the radio to music that I do feel and understand. And I dance. I dance in my own little world that I now know exists only in its own time and place. It’s still fun but it’s not the same. It’s not the same as when I believed that what I knew was everything, that it was all there is.
I’m wiser now, I suppose. So, there’s that. But it still feels strange to realize that there are a lot of things, now, that are no longer for me. And it hurts a little to know that the kind of dancer I was, the kind that’s inside me, is a limited kind. One that exists only in a particular place and time, in a world that is not as large or as all-encompassing as I once thought.
Copyright © Aili Whalen 2025. All rights reserved.
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