Fancy Footwork

My daughter dances. (She sings and acts too, but for the purpose of this metaphor, she dances). She takes classes and learns new steps and explores new styles and performs when she gets the chance.

I don’t dance. I can’t really watch a video and pick up steps, I am far from light on my feet, and “performing” tends to scare me, except when it simply means doing the job that is expected of me.

Yet, at the moment, I find that I am becoming adept at a lot of fancy footwork. Truthfully, it has little to do with my actual feet. While seated, feet completely still, I am clutching on to some degree of control in this college admissions waiting month by attempting to arrange and rearrange all our info. If X college is a “no,” what does that mean for colleges A, B, F, and Q? And is the “no” from X a complete no (either in their minds or ours), or is it a redirection to another program? And is that program one we (I know it’s “she,” but it feels like “we”) can live with? 

In some ways, her dances and mine are the same—based on fairly constant movement, built from a million tiny pieces, designed to create a smooth flow. But while she dances in front of an audience, my footwork is strictly behind the scenes—in minutes and hours when others are busy or asleep, in my mind or on many pieces of scrap paper or in assorted Word docs and emails, for situations and results that may not end up requiring the practiced steps. I am hopeful that my fancy footwork will, in some way, help her to continue hers. And, in the meantime, the fancy footwork is making me feel as though I am taking steps. Even if some of those steps are simply walking in circles.