Written by: Mariah Boone
~ Web Site: Lone Star Ma Magazine
Anne Shirley, the heroine of L.M. Montgomery’s
classic Anne of Green Gables books, discovers as she grows up
that “kindred spirits” are a lot more common than
she had thought they were in her childhood. Motherhood is very
like that. I think the world could also be very like that, if
we let it.
My six-year-old takes ballet classes for forty-five minutes every
Thursday evening. Her classes are held in a ballet school housed
in a venerable older building that might once have been a stately
home. It is almost entirely studio space now, and the parents
of the little ballet students spend the class time in a rather
extremely cramped lobby while the children dance in an adjoining
studio. The lobby has a window into the studio, but the window
is curtained so that one must peer up from underneath it to get
a glance into the classroom. Once a term, parents are welcomed
into the studio to watch the class. Mostly, we wait rather than
watch.
Communities are born of strange circumstances.
When my daughter first started ballet, we knew one other child
in the class from school. Several of the other children had been
taking dancing classes together for a couple of years. As time
has passed, other families have come to the school, mostly strangers
and one neighbor. Always during class, the lobby is filled to
a toddlers-on-laps-and-some-standing level of bursting with mothers,
the siblings of ballet students and the occasional father or grandparent.
Waiting for ballet.
We know each other now. The brothers who used to dread the idea
of waiting for ballet now look forward to playing chess with each
other on the floor. Toddlers are passed around the lobby like
community property, with everybody feeding them. Homeowner’s
insurance, schools, houses, husbands, mothers-in-law and birthday
parties are discussed in their most intimate details. We watch
out for each other’s children when a mother has to run an
errand and make sure that no little people sneak out the door
unchaperoned. We are a community.
I can’t say exactly how it happened, but at some amorphous
point we stopped being strangers and became this community of
mothers and children. I am always humbled in any venue in which
this spirit of community arises…it is such a natural occurrence
between the mothers of children and yet it is a miraculous thing
of beauty and power, as well. It is a microcosm of a world that
cooperates peacefully and accepts strangers as self. There is
some conflict, like the day when a local principal overheard another
mother criticizing the public schools, but it is brief and reasonably
managed. I wish more people could, in these small unintentional
eruptions of community, see the potential for community on a more
global scale. World peace is just this: finding oneself in a small
space with people that you may not have much in common with and
turning it into a safe place together. I don’t think it
can be much different than waiting for ballet.
Mariah Boone is a mother, social worker, writer and the publisher
of Lone Star Ma: The Magazine of Progressive Texas Parenting and
Children’s Issues. For more information, or to subscribe
to Lone Star Ma, go to www.LoneStarMa.com.
