I Do Believe in Fairies

So all summer we’ve been making the trek to the beach, and the boys have been surfing and we’ve been swimming and frsibeeing and digging and walking and sunning. And Emma’s been tumbling.

As a kid I loved gymnastics class. I took a class out in Rustic Canyon (we called it Rusted Canyon) and it felt like I took it for years but probably it was a few months. I loved it but I was tall and I don’t know why we didn’t keep going, maybe I then took riding lessons and once I met Cheerios the horse I was done with everything except horses for the rest of my life.

But I didn’t forget gymnastics, and at 10 I saw Nadia win the gold medal and get her perfect 10 and I remember being in Maryland, in a cabin by the water and spending the summer walking to the little general store and getting an ice cream, watching the olympics and I remember wanting to be a gymnast.

Then 25 years later I had this baby. And six years after that she’s always upside down. So then I take her to gymnastics class. We go to a tiny class, because we’re not going to the Olympics, and because the new baby on my lap can play on the floor there while Emma is doing her gymnastics.

And now it’s eight years after that and we’re on the beach and Emma is 14, leaping into the sky, her legs flat out in front and flat out in back, leaping like she can fly, like her secret weapon is her fairy heart, her wings floating her up, lightness, her beauty backed up by her solid muscle body.

But that’s just Emma. She’s always upside down. Practicing.

We went to her school show today. 9th grade. Performing art magnet. Who knows if our school is a sketchy school. People always want to head to the OTHER schools. The OTHER schools are better because they’re not HERE, where we live. Where they’ve grown up. Where we are.

We just go to the local school. Sketchy or not, we are here because we believe.

There are other acts on the stage and then it’s dance. And then there is Emma. In front of thirty other girls. Leaping through the air. Upside down. Telling us this story, the one she’s been telling us for years. This beautiful light fairy daughter, with the tree strong body exactly the right long and lean, she isn’t trying, she is dancing and tumbling and she’s the center, out front, the kids behind her her ocean. She’s on the beach.

I sat there by Barry, both of us watching in the auditorium of the high school, both of us seeing our daughter as she always is but I actually see it. She’s soaring.

Sometimes you do nothing but sit there and see this music played back to you, all this time, you didn’t know you’ve been practicing, and you get to sit and just see it, all moments leaping up into one moment, so they become all the same moment.

Gymnastics, the beach, the slow slow summer, the running across the sand and leaping into the air, every moment do you know? Everything you are doing, every moment you are training, and the training is soul.

She was up on the stage but she was on the beach. Free. I just had to look up, and see her flying.

And for moms out there:

You think you know everything because you’ve had to be in charge of tiny people for 16 years keeping them from falling off cliffs and putting fingers in light sockets and picking shitty friends and not getting in car accidents so you have this chip on you shoulder like you’re DOING EVERYHING because you in fact DOING EVERYTHING, feeding clothing emotional security physical security but guess what

Now you have to say goodbye to all that because you don’t know anything. You think you can see the end of yourself and the end of everyone else but that is why religion was invented because it is scary to realize that you are a machine and you are an alive flailing thing you are both and you are not in control of any of it.

This is where you trust your animal instinct. You smell the air you listen for a sound you feel your skin prickle you know when you are doing something right and when you are doing something marginal but other than that it is all made up and hopefully you can be a leader and simultaneously be nothing

Because in that quiet when you’re doing nothing you’re allowing something else to come in
And fill you up
You get to hear the music
You’ve been practicing
Playing right in front of you


And that is what it was like to see Emma dance.