May 29, 2025
Haven does not want to be on a stage.
It is clear on those accidental occasions when she is put on one anyway, when, for example, the current of the school calendar winds its way through events like ‘spring concert,’ and ‘poetry festival.’ With a dozen other four-year-olds, she is, with great ceremony and enthusiasm, ushered to the small elevated platform in the school gym. Guiding teacher figure just off stage, she, along with the other, more willing participants, is compelled to perform some artistic gem which the children have apparently digested under the tutelage of this great house of learning.
Most children shine under the gaze of an audience. Some display the perfection of their adherence to the practiced plan, dutifully, earnestly, performing the prescribed motions, seeking to awe with their perfected grasp of the script. Others make a grand occasion of the spotlight, hamming it up for an audience they seem to implicitly trust is enamored with their talent and charm, inventing unauthorized adaptations of the choreography they’ve all practiced, always with an eye toward the eyes on them.
Not Haven.
Haven is perhaps the bravest of them all, proudly, stubbornly, consistently resisting. She is entirely unswayed by the cheery performers to her right and left. She stands still, staring out at the audience, daring parent and teach alike to just try and make her move. She won’t, not unless she wants to. She sings incessantly in the car, voice cheerful and confident, warbling relatively on key through a parade of Gabby’s Dollhouse and Taylor Swift songs. But in this school gymnasium, crammed with relatively tame rows of older kids looking on, a bleacher full of parents fills out the back, she has no wish to comply. Haven stands still, silent, for the entire pre-K performance.
We have not yet enrolled our shy, stubborn youngest child in what you would call activities.
When our oldest, now eight, was younger, I couldn’t wait for him to reach the sufficient age of maturity to begin engaging his body and mind in the carousel of activities awaiting the modern child. Would he take up violin? Tae kwon do? Perhaps he’d find an appropriately quirky but respectable path as a blossoming robotics engineer or poet. It’s a wide horizon: this child could be enriched in any of a few dozen ways; what an adventure we would have exploring.
We have landed, in fact, in places that feel entirely predictable, echoes of my own childhood activities: soccer, piano, scouts. Not to say it isn’t fun, and we don’t explore, but several years later we are viscerally aware of what we only knew in theory before, the logistical toll of the enrichment. Soccer mom is a real job. Not necessarily a hard one, not, in our case, when our son can walk across the street unchaperoned to weekly soccer practice at school, not when a piano teacher comes to our home.
But it isn’t so much the difficulty as the cumulation of logistics. Any single set of commitments—weekly games, practices, equipment, taking a turn with snacks, gift for the coaches—is manageable. Multiply by each child, by each activity, and it quickly creeps, without active consent, into the dreaded whirlwind, eats up any semblance of downtime. Activities sound great when your schedule is empty, but from the vantage point of car window on its way to another evening event, the holy grail of family life looks like just being together doing nothing.
So no, our youngest does not need to begin activities just yet. She can remain, for as long as possible, an adorable appendage to her older siblings, without requirements of her own.
And then one early December day we enter Target, and our successful resistance of the maelstrom collides against the allure of pink tulle.
No shopping list, probably just picking up a prescription. But Target is the kind of dangerous wonderland where you enter for a prescription with a $4.72 copay and leave with $100 in house décor and cleaning supplies.
As a recent college grad, entering Target generated a feeling of immense wealth and power. I couldn’t afford much, but I could afford the odd $20 splurge, and $20 at Target could be splurged in infinite tempting variations. A scarf, a sweater, a throw pillow, shoes—any of them could be mine. Once I was having a bad day, dropped in with $10 and left with a DVD of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights; what magic!
I could feel the rampant rot of materialism threatening to take hold. I noticed how stepping across the Target threshold created, without warning, a desperate sense of wanting. Because of the approachable price tags—it was easy, too easy, to go from wanting to buying. The object of desire was always just in reach enough to be dangerous. I found I had to steer clear entirely to protect my soul.
Twenty years later with my four-year-old, I feel the same old temptation. Here for the prescription, we wander upstairs to look for a Christmas present she can give her sister, a headband or socks she can theoretically earn by doing something to help mama, symbolically paying for the gift so it is truly from her, not me. I have principles.
Once we arrive in the accessories aisle, however, her attention is immediately diverted from the columns of socks to a compact section where, on innocuous plastic hangers, await the stuff dreams are made of: baby pink ballet leotards, fluffy tutus, a pixie dream girl garland of tiny ballet shoes strung from above
She makes a beeline to the pink fluff and looks up at me with a face full of yearning. In an instant, this child, who has up until now had a hard line on any peer-based extracurriculars, barely a playdate, is smitten. With the same stubbornness she brings to resisting singing in the Pre-K concert, she wants to fall headlong into this new obsession. “I want to do ballet!” she croons, looking up at me with the same lovestruck eyes you might see in response to a puppy.
One encounter with all this bubblegum fluff is hardly enough to sustain an enduring passion. With such a frail foundation of commitment, why do I succumb? I, an expert at saying no to requests for candy in the check-out lane? Maybe the smitten cherub face is irresistible. Maybe I’ve been waiting for this expression of desire and am eager to steer it. Either way: I buy the leotard. Once she receives it for Christmas, she’s wearing it daily, dancing along with her experienced older sister.
We find a ballet class down the street, where a friend’s similar-aged daughter attends, and apparently Haven can join mid-year. We’re skeptical; pink fluff can only carry you so far, and we have no evidence our clingy shy child will handle this any differently than the Pre-K concert. But we get a trial week, so why not try?
So it is that Haven shows up the first week of January for her first ever activity.
Nate, on ballet duty, reports back optimistically: “Well, she went up the stairs at least. She lasted for maybe 10 minutes of stretching before I guess she sat down and watched the rest of the time? But they said to bring her back and keep trying.”
Am I just forcing her into a mold she doesn’t fit? “Honey,” I tell her, as she sits on my lap gazing up at me with the same unblemished adoration given the ballet attire, “do you really want to do ballet, or do you just want the outfit? Are you actually going to participate?” I should be thinking about her welfare, but I’m really thinking: We don’t want to pay for a class if you’re not going to participate.
“I’ll participate,” she adjures, stumbling over the many syllables. But one thing is clear: she wants to go back.
The next week, there’s a complete turnaround—or so we’re told, as parents aren’t allowed in the studio. From week two onward, she’s on the floor with the other dancers the whole time, participating as promised. Kindly Miss Barbara, the teacher, confirms she’s doing fine.
For her part, Haven is breathlessly in love. She wakes up on Monday morning counting the days. “Tomorrow is Girls Adventure Club. The next day is small group. The next day is bal-lay-ay!!” she routinely exclaims, singing out the world with unabashed joy. She comes home from ballet each week ecstatic, gushing, “I want to do ballet forever!” Could it be more than just a pretty outfit?
Then it’s time for the annual show. I’m torn. It conflicts with something we’d already planned, and it’s not cheap, especially if the primary purpose is watching a four-year-old be cute, something we do regularly at home anyway. But if Haven loves ballet so much, perhaps we should make the effort?
“Do you really want us to come to your show?” we ask gently, reluctant but, you know, willing to sacrifice.
Haven is adamant. “No! I don’t want to be on stage.”
Miss Barbara is not concerned. “That’s fine,” she assures us, “we hope Haven returns next year and performs then!
But since you’ll miss the recital, if you want to see what she’s been working on, you can come to her rehearsal the week before?”
The practice studio is a sacred, cordoned off space—no parents allowed. What happens in ballet is between Miss Barbara and the girls. When we wait in the lobby to be ushered up into the sanctum for the rehearsal portion of practice, other parents gape, “they’re letting you up there?” We nod sagely, explaining the situation. Gazes of awe follow as Miss Barbara leads us up to watch.
As we ascend the stairs, she glances behind to confide, “I hope she dances for you like she’s been dancing in class. She’s been participating so well, really getting into the dancing!”
Miss Barbara sits us in stools facing a line of four-year olds, introducing us as the “audience.” She sends them to their respective colored dots, where they lay down with heads resting on their tiny hands, awaiting the music’s cue. “Sleeping fairies, wake up!” she calls, as the music starts.
Our sleeping fairy arises with the other girls, face shining, following Miss Barbara’s cues just a smidge of a beat behind. Fairy wings to the right! To the left! Jump up, now back! She prances around the mirrored studio, face alight, her widest grin, fully alive. During the ‘free dance’ portion, she flits about the room on a cloud all her own, a vision of pure bliss. Unlike those kids on the bleachers, looking out on the audience as they sing for the eyes looking back at them, she’s in her own world, participating with a freedom and joy independent of audience.
Haven may not want to be on a stage, but boy, she loves to dance.
