I Will Tap Dance, I Will Tap Dance…
When did you try to learn something and were soul-crushingly bad at it? Last night at tap class for me. “Bend you knees,” our teacher instructs the four adult women in the studio as he starts the rhythmic, drumming music to accompany the combination he just showed us. I bend my knees; I am nothing if not an obedient student. “Molly, relax,” he says. I had thought I was relaxed but try to imitate the way he shakes out his arms, similar to a boxer in the corner of the ring, waiting to pummel his opponent. I move my feet when the music starts but fail to create the sounds that are considered tap dancing. I estimate that I have executed two percent of the combination correctly. It might be funny if I didn’t feel like crying.
At forty-three, I am made aware daily of the slow slide of the aging process. Arms too short to hold my book at the correct length to be read. Veins popping out uninvited into the top layers of my legs. Pounds on the scale despite increased exercise and restraint with my eating. These manifestations on my physical shell fly in the face of how I generally feel about getting older – I’m just starting to come into my own.
After decades in the restaurant business, my husband and I have given up standing behind the stove and serving plates to make a living. Although we have a total of three failed marriages between us, we will celebrate our eighteenth wedding anniversary soon. I wrote a novel last year that is set to be published in September. My teenage daughters are generally happy and well adjusted – no time spent in jail or rehab. And best of all, I simply don’t care as much anymore about what people think of me. Or as a friend recently put it – I don’t give two fucks about that. So, why am I torturing myself with tap lessons?
A recent study in the journal Psychological Science showed that learning a new skill could help ward off dementia. Another study by Art Kramer, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois, demonstrated that exercise increased the volume of the brain, improving memory. Neither of my grandmothers could recognize me prior to their deaths. My mother has expressed concern over her memory on several occasions. So here I stand, shaking my arms out in the corner of the ring, trying to relax before I attempt to battle memory loss.
“What are we doing with our arms during the slide?” I ask our teacher, an enthusiastic dancer who is half my age. “Don’t worry about your arms,” he tells me, “you are overthinking this.” So instead, I fixate on the thought, “Don’t overthink this.” It doesn’t work – what are my arms doing! I decide to smile instead of trying to get all the sounds in or figuring out what to do with my arms. Tap dancing is supposed to be fun! After I fail another combination, I let out a woohoo! and give my better tap-dancing classmate a high five. This is my forced effort to lighten up.
Perfectionism is a cruel master. Anne Lamont wrote in Bird By Bird that perfectionism is “the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life…” She was addressing this wisdom to writers, but its implications are far-reaching – it will keep me from learning how to tap dance if I let it. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcom Gladwell argues that the key to mastery in any field is practicing around 10,000 hours. I console myself with this as I drive home from class. I have put in about five hours so far – why should I expect to be good at tap? Probably because I am good at a different kind of dance, ballet, one that I got my thousands of hours of practice in at a young age. And because I want to be good at everything. How obnoxious.
At home relaxing on the couch with my husband, I mentally review the steps from the last combination of class. Robert is watching the latest House of Cards season; our daughters are upstairs bickering over what music is playing in their shared bathroom. I try to remember the difference between a stomp and a stamp. Without moving on the couch, I dance the routine in my head. I am confident only about the opening steps and final clicks. It is the long middle portion that needs work - it needs a lot of work.
And so it is with life. The beginning is already in the books, and the end will likely be something I can’t control. It’s the middle part, the now, that requires my full attention. Which is why I punish my ego weekly in trying to learn something new. To expand what I expect from myself and to do whatever I can so that if my future has grandchildren in it, that I may recognize them up until my end. And maybe even teach them a shuffle-ball-change.