BALLET
One, two, three, four. We dip our legs down and touch the floor. Five, six, seven, eight. We raise our arm’s to heaven’s gate. Again and again we bend and bow. Again and again we straighten and smile.
This is ballet.
Repetition to the point of death, it is a comfort, a solace, an unchanging force of nature in the world of chaos around us. When lights go out and the darkness heaves in, toes can still point and flex, point and flex. When noise of conflict rises over the barbed wire wall, knees can still bend and straighten, bend and straighten, bum down, back like a bean pole. When there’s no music for flourishing and twirling, there is counting for plies and tendus. When there is no barre there is a wall, when there is no class there is memory.
Ballet is a constant. The body remembers the moves, the counts. The muscles find comfort in the aches, the joints find home in the rhythm. Ballet is a place where the body finds belonging.
As many girls did, I danced during most of my childhood. I loved it. I loved being a part of a great room of girls mimicking our heroically beautiful teacher who spent most of her time correcting our poor performance. I loved the uniformity of our leotards and the synchrony of our movements.
It felt, if I closed my eyes, I belonged, even though one look in the grand mirrors would tell you I didn’t. I was mismatched and out of place. My grammar was laughed at, faltering and wrong. My vocabulary was limited and my accent was not up to par with the other girls. I drove the furthest for this class, I came from out of town, I came from the barrio where the rubbish floated along puddles of water for months. I didn’t go home with a driver to a well air conditioned, nicely tiled home in the city centre. I didn’t attend the expensive Luandan schools.
I belonged even less when the class was over. We bowed and clapped and were let loose to find our parents. There, in the waiting room amidst a gaggle of very classy Portuguese women was a safari hat wearing, khaki shirt sporting man. My dad.
I’m sure the mums were always impressed that he came to collect me, even if he was sweaty from an evening of errands in Luanda. I’m sure they found a lot of delight at the American missionary who sat patiently on Tuesday and Thursday evenings for his young daughter to prance out of class, glowing with sweat and ready for the two, three hour ride through traffic to home. I am sure they were welcoming, in their way, but he certainly didn’t belong there.
Ballet didn’t belong in Angola. I remember thinking this as a I walked to the car after class with my pink dance bag clutched to my side. My ballet shoes leaping between mounds of dirt and soapy water - the remnants of someone having their car unwittingly washed on the street (but for which they would now certainly be required to pay, they were provided a service after all).
Ballet didn’t belong in our four wheel drive Toyota Hilux as it grunted through a two lane motorway that had seven lanes of traffic. Ballet didn’t belong in our compound, where bullet shells found their way into our garden, barbed wire snagged soaring plastic bags, and the generator splattered oil over my dad’s jeans every other week.
I was a misfit to the ballet class. Ballet was a misfit to the whole country. So together, perhaps we did sort of belong.
Ballet and I belonged to one another for a long time. While I was in boarding school I would rehearse the quiet, consistent steps in my dorm room during overwhelming moments. I shared my love of it by helping teach a little ballet class on campus. It was comforting - it was a piece of home strapped to my feet with pink elastic.
Ballet didn’t quite belong in the Rift Valley either, but then again, neither did an international school full of cultures and languages and varying faiths and experiences. In the same way that my peers and I knew we didn’t belong entirely in Kijabe, we knew we belonged with one another, fierce friendships forged over years of boarding, of packing up and moving through life with one another.
Belonging is a challenging concept for TCKs.
It’s an elusive, coveted thought. Sometimes we belong whole heartedly and sometimes we are flailing, at the very edge of belonging, desperately trying to catch up with those around us so that we can, just for a beat, really fit.
I know this isn’t unique to TCKs. I know that we all have jagged edges from our own experiences, we all bang and bump around in this world, fumble through the steps to feign some sort of cohesion to the corps. I understand that everyone has difficulty, at one time or another, with belonging. Whether it’s not belonging in your family, in your town, in your church, in your friend group, in your school, in your work environment.
Everyone knows what it is to feel a little out of place and out of step.
But, TCKs, in my experience, know what it is to feel VERY out of place ALL of the time. There are very few memories I have where I can say I really felt like I belonged - practising ballet is one of them. It wasn’t necessarily the ballet classes themselves, as I mentioned my dad and I were very out of place in the studio, it was the consistency of the moves and the familiarity of my body with the music. It was a small thing, an inconsequential thing, something others might not understand, but it was also vital to me, a life line of constancy in an ever more chaotic existence.
In another TCK blog Michelle Phoenix, writes about the Ache of Unbelonging experienced by many MKs. She unpacks the different ways MKs try to diminish this ache, whether by fully embracing their ‘misfitted-ness’ or by erasing the parts of themselves that don’t fit. Ultimately, the coping mechanism that is most common, but still challenging, is ‘Straddling.’
‘Straddling allows us to retain all those facets that lend depth and breadth to our identities while mostly adapting to the new places life takes us. In order to successfully straddle cultures, we’ll have to understand each of them, retaining those other-culture quirks that are acceptable in the place where we are and disengaging those that might be jarring or misunderstood by the “natives” around us—at least initially.’
She goes on to write about how straddling multiple cultures in an effort to find belonging really brings MKs to a point of ‘mostly-belonging.’
‘Mostly-belonging isn’t a repudiation of the multi-cultural aspects of our identities—it’s a thoughtful, intentional choice to connect to the culture we now live in without losing the other cultures we carry within us, because that’s what makes us unique, broad-minded, tolerant, chameleon-like and prized members of society.’
I found this a very apt way to describe the TCK experience when it comes to belonging. We know we can never fit in fully with our surroundings because so much of ourselves is scattered around the world, carried on by places and people we will never see again. We also know that to survive, we have to find some semblance of belonging, because we are corporeal beings who require community.
So, we mostly belong. We find bits of ourselves that we can alter or quiet in order to fit a little neater. We find things that we enjoy about our new culture (or original culture) that we can build ourselves around. And through it all, we try to find moments to ourselves where we can just be.
For myself, those moments came with ballet. Throughout university and beyond I practised, quietly, in my dorm room and then in my flat. I used my old, worn shoes and Youtube lessons like Lazy Dancer Tips.
It has been comfort to be able to reach out my arms, bend my knees, sweat a little, and remember a part of me that has been carried throughout the continents. These are the same feet that danced in Portugal, on stage in Angola, at the embassy in Tanzania, in a classroom in Kenya, in a studio in Texas, in an attic flat in Cambridge. There is something lovely and wonderful about knowing the moves haven’t changed, the beats remain the same, and my body, older and achier (especially since having a child) can still belong to the dance and the dance can belong to me.
As a Christian, I know I belong with Christ, and I know the Lord has prepared a perfect and beautiful Home for me. I also know He has not made a mistake in placing me on this earth, to a missionary family with many, many homes, cultures, and experiences. I know, at times, it can be easy as an MK or a TCK to envy those who have a ‘normal’ upbringing and it is tempting to long for the familiarity and stability that must come with that. But it is so important to remember that the trajectory of your life, or your family’s life, was not unintentional, was not mistaken, but carefully orchestrated under a Sovereign God.
When I feel extra out of place, either in a Tennessee University or a Cambridge formal, I try to hold onto that Truth. And I try to remember the times I have been given where I feel I do really fit, really belong - in a dorm room in Kenya eating cheesecake with three close friends, in a friend's garden in Cambridge drinking tea, trekking through Crieff with lifetime friends and family, in a parking lot in Jackson TN listening to Taylor Swift with a best friend, walking hand in hand with my love, rocking my daughter to sleep, and alone, with old shoes, poor form, and a girl’s memory of a long ago home.
I'm grateful for these moments and the ones to come - however fleeting - and I am looking forward to when I enter my final Home, to never feeling out of step again.