How to Survive Taking Lessons from your Mother
By Savanah Radaelli
From the way I see it, having a child take lessons from
their mom–in anything–can go one of two ways. Possibility one, the mother can
give special treatment to her child and either be very easy or very hard on
them. Possibility two, she can treat her child like every other student she
has. I got the latter with my mom, and in some ways I think it was a more shocking
experience than the first one could have ever been.
I started taking Belly Dance lessons from my mom, Leyla
Najma, when I was about nine years old. It was no coincidence that this was
around the time that she started to get a couple other students my age. I started
to make friends with them and the idea of taking classes with my friends seemed
like a fun idea, so I joined a troupe called the Pharaoh’s Daughters and
started taking lessons from my mom. Sure
it was fun, but also something else that I hadn’t been expecting; hard.
I will admit that since I have been around Belly Dancing my
whole life, and I have been watching lessons for years, I guess I thought I
would have some naturally obtained talent for the art form. It was a bit
surprising when I found that I knew practically nothing about correct body
posture, timing, or muscle control.
My fingers would curl almost into a fist whenever I was
focusing too hard on a move, I couldn’t understand how to move my hips to the
side while walking, and the timing of moves took a lot of training before we
could all match each other. To say that the classes were a little more
frustrating than I had initially thought is an understatement. The fact that my
mother was a hard-core teacher, one who expected quality effort from her
students, just proved further that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought.
Eventually my mom figured out that my frustration was
directed at the increasingly obvious fact I wasn’t born a natural Belly Dancer.
She explained to me that no one is born with the knowledge of all the moves and
muscle control, everyone has a learning period, and it takes time and practice
to develop all the skills. It didn’t fully sink in though until she told me
that when she first started out, she had the skills of a beginner too.
Considering all the amazing things my mom can do now with Belly Dancing, this
gave me some hope for my future dance career.
It’s not that I was a horrible dancer; I was just at a beginning
level. While my nine-year-old self was a little disappointed that I wasn’t born
with all the knowledge of how to belly dance, the lessons were a lot of fun and
I got over it quickly. But the other shocker came when I found that my mom was
just as hard on me as she was with every other student in her class.
There were many things about my dancing that needed
correcting, and while I was not the only one my mom had to help out, my
daughter mentality often took my mother’s help as criticism. This led to some bickering
and eye rolling. I even had to be put in time-out once (please remember I was
nine years old at the time), but we always straightened things out.
Looking back on it I think it was the fact that I was
getting corrected by my mom in front of my friends that embarrassed me and
caused me to argue. Even though she was the teacher and me the student, it took
a while to get that through to my brain. I had to forget for a little while
that I was her daughter and just learn.
I officially preformed once. The Pharaohs Daughters
preformed at the Maxwell Museum at UNM campus for Egyptologists who were apart
of American Research Center in Egypt and we were, in one word, okay. No one
fell off the stage or crashed into each other (which we had done a couple times
while practicing) and we were more or less in sync with the music. But we
weren’t quite as in sync with each other and there were a few mess-ups as far
as the choreography went. We were young, cute, and the choreography was good,
which is probably what saved the performance.
In the end, my fellow troupe members and I survived our
performance, and were giddy with accomplishment afterward. After all it takes a
lot of courage to get up on a stage and dance in front of a lot of people. I
was extremely nervous beforehand, the kind of nervousness where your body just
doesn’t want to move and it thinks that if you can’t get on the stage there
will be nothing to worry about. It helped that my first performance was with
other girls my age. It made the whole
thing more fun and less nerve racking. It was good for me experience that,
because there is nothing better to help a person get over stage fright then to
have over a hundred people staring at them as the main entertainment for the
moment. At that point it’s either dance, flee, or freeze. The first option is
most often the least embarrassing one.
Now that I’ve gotten older, my mom and I can practice with
each other without wanting to throttle each other. I am grateful to say that I
have improved in the course of eight years, even though I wasn’t practicing
Belly Dance for the majority of that time. Even though I practice Belly Dance a
little now, I know now that I will most likely never study to be a professional
Belly Dancer.
In the course of everything, I experienced one possibility
of how a child learning from their mother can go, but I also learned something
else. How things fold out beyond that? It depends on the relationship between
the mother and daughter. I found out I had a pretty strong bond with mine, and
in my eyes, just learning that made the whole experience worth it.
