How to Survive Taking Lessons from your Mother

By Savanah Radaelli

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.