Helena Mary Cole

You might be autistic if you were drawn to activities like dance or gymnastics as a child. 

This is a non-specific trait, of course. Plenty of people enjoy dance and/or gymnastics without being autistic. But if you find the full-body movement that comes naturally with these activities soothing, that can count as autistic stimming. It provides a socially acceptable outlet for the need to stim in that way, which is nifty as well as necessary. 

I’m not sure how true this is for the younger generations, but when I was a kid, most of the girls I knew took ballet lessons for one or two years when they were really little, like five or six, but then didn’t bother continuing. Everyone did it. Most gave it up quickly. But I started ballet lessons at five or six and stuck with them until I was thirteen, which is interesting to note. 

Just between you and me, I wasn’t all that good, nor was I very dedicated. I wasn’t a ballet talent that anyone expected to have a future in professional dancing, and I’m not even sure I ever wanted that. It’s clear that I liked doing it, because I kept choosing to take lessons year after year, when my parents gave me that option. If I’d kept on, I might have been able to get a job at Miss Edie Edward’s Ballet Academy (the school where I took lessons) teaching five- and six-year-olds to point and plie eventually. But then again, maybe not. Like I said, I was not the most dedicated student. 

I can remember, when I was in grade two, I missed a morning of school to dance my first ever ballet examination. I had to wear my hair slicked back in a tight bun for the exam, which gave my face a sort of alien look I didn’t like. The worst thing was, there wasn’t time to wash all the gel out of my hair before I went back to school in the afternoon, so we just left it up, and when I entered the classroom (all the kids were sitting on the floor), quite the sensation went through the crowd as everyone discovered that I was barely recognizable with my hair like that. And if there’s anything an autistic child dreads, it’s making a sensation. I didn’t know how to respond; I was anxious; I wished everyone would just ignore my hair, please, please, please. 

I can remember being so good at the pas de chat (the step of the cat) that Miss Edie invited the entire class from the grade below, where they were just starting to learn the step, to come into our classroom to watch me do it. Which was a super big deal because Miss Edie, as the owner of the school, left most of the teaching to other women she hired, but she often popped into classes to observe, and if she liked something you were doing, well, that was praise indeed. I also danced an exemplary glissade. 

I can also remember finding out that I have uncommonly inflexible joints. Regular physical examinations were part of the package if you stuck with ballet beyond the first couple of years. My body does not bend very well. It’s common for autistic people to have co-occurring Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, or EDS, which makes their joints uncommonly flexible. Well, I got the opposite extreme. Your average person on the street can bend better than I can. If I worked hard on developing my flexibility, I was not even expected to achieve the average in that regard. So, it’s just as well that I never wanted to be a dancer because that probably would have been a hindrance. 

And I could never get the knack of spotting my head for pirouettes! Spotting is the little trick dancers use to keep themselves from getting dizzy while doing turns. For some reason, spotting my head always made me dizzier than ever. 

One year, for the end-of-year exam, I can remember being taught a particular Russian ballet dance that told a little story about life a peasant in Tsarist Russia, and I can remember being harped on all the time because my dancing “lacked emotion.” This was extremely confusing to me – I had no idea what they were talking about. I was getting the steps right, wasn’t I? What more did they want from me? And why did none of the other girls get bugged about that? What were they doing differently? 

I know what my teachers meant now — it’s like the difference between plunking out all the correct notes on a piano and actually making music. If you don’t put something of yourself into it, it’s all form and no heart. A talented child will do that without thinking about it (I did it with my writing, sometimes). It’s really a process of letting go, isn’t it?  So, whether or not I would have been able to give my dancing some heart even if I’d understood the concept back then is uncertain. I also don’t know why I never received this criticism until I had to do the Russian dance – maybe this dance was designed to teach young dancers how to express themselves through movement. I’m not sure.  They told me to smile at a particular point in the dance, at the point where it stops speaking of the endless toil of the Russian peasantry and turns lively and optimistic, so smile I did. The report on my exam that year said, “Her dancing conveyed no emotion whatsoever except briefly at one point when she smiled.” And that speaks to me of my autism. 

In my last year or so of lessons, I got old enough to start dancing en pointe, which means dancing up on, not just the ball of the foot, but on the tip of the toe. Not a lot of people know this, but ballet dancers do not dance en pointe in a simple leather slipper or on their bare toes. You use a special pointe shoe where the entire toe area has been hardened by a special glue. This enables you to dance on the tip of your toes without completely destroying your feet. There’s a reason why dancing en pointe is reserved for those aged twelve and older: it would be unwise to do so while your bones aren’t yet fully developed. It is brutal on your feet. The hardened end of the pointe shoe is more cylindrical than it is foot shaped. I always found just jamming my foot in there was almost too painful to bear. Oh, I hated dancing en pointe. It was sheer agony. Some of the girls in my class covered their toes completely in band-aids but still had blood-stained tights. They winced when they put their shoes on, but they bore it and kept going. This is what I mean when I say I was not dedicated. I was not at all willing to suffer in that way for the sake of dancing and couldn’t understand why the other girls would do that to themselves. 

All of this gives me reason to suspect it was the soothing movement of ballet that I liked. Adding pain to the equation was a deal-breaker. And so, I lost interest in it. It’s also no coincidence that I hit puberty right then, and that complicated the situation, for similar reasons to why I gave up swimming lessons that same year. 

But all in all, I’m glad I took ballet lessons for so long. I am not very coordinated in my body but that would probably have been much worse if I hadn’t learned to dance. Plus, the recitals were always a lot of fun. I loved learning and repeatedly practising the dances the teachers choreographed. I liked the colourful costumes. It was also really cool hanging out backstage while the show was on, waiting excitedly for my class’s turn (some years, we danced two numbers), munching on Hickory Sticks from the vending machine, perching on a high stool in front of a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. 

This past summer, I discovered that the community centre in our neighbourhood, which runs a very popular dance program, offers a ballet class for kids as young as three. Leah turned three last March, and she was displaying signs that she likes to dance. She loves watching movies where there’s a lot of singing and dancing, and she often gets up and tries to copy the moves she sees on the screen. I was excited to sign her up for the class because I was sure she would love it. 

It was already going well, I thought, when we went to the second-hand shop last August to buy her first pair of ballet slippers. When it comes to autistic kids and clothes/shoes they aren’t used to, it’s always possible you’re going to hit a roadblock. Lance in particular will refuse to wear an unfamiliar garment/shoe/boot. For example, he has yet to willingly wear a Hallowe’en costume. But Leah loved those ballet slippers from the moment she saw them, and happily tried on a couple pairs until I thought I had a good size for her. 

The evening of the first lesson, Leah was so happy to see the slippers come out of her dance bag that she barely even noticed I was also dressing her up in tights. 

We had a bit of a hiccup that first lesson. First of all, I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to go into the classroom till we had been called, so I just took Leah in and let her run around until the teacher came and told us to step outside. Oops. None of the other moms made that mistake. I’ve been trying not to beat myself up about it. Second, when Leah was called in for the lesson, I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to come in with her, which was really jarring because I mentioned on her online registration form that she is on the autism spectrum and needed a support person. 

Really, I didn’t think she’d attend the class unless I stayed in the room with her. Leah is not only autistic but she’s also a pandemic baby. For half her life, gatherings weren’t even allowed. She is not at all accustomed to group situations and she has done very little outside our home without one or the other of her parents. She often has her brothers with her. 

So, when the teachers asked me to leave, I experienced this confusion and anxiety that I could not express. I thought they knew she needed a support person. Why didn’t they know? Can I tell them she won’t stay unless I’m here? How can I explain that so they’ll believe it? I didn’t think I was going to have to explain so I was totally unprepared. Slight panic. Really, it’s like a wrench gets thrown into your brain gears and something short-circuits. I don’t know why I didn’t think to use my text-to-speech app. It’s at times like that I find myself grasping for words but the words all slip away. Until finally I realize, “I don’t think I can explain so I’d better just do what they ask.” I was almost in tears, and Leah followed me out of the room and back again twice before I just turned and bolted out. 

I was standing outside the door with my heart in my throat for about thirty seconds before Leah came out, also almost in tears, saying, mournfully, “Hi, Mommy.” I think it was then that the dance teacher realized she wasn’t going to stay inside without me, and I managed to say, “she’s autistic” and they allowed me to sit off to the side of the room near the door. Leah stuck close to me at first, happy to just smile at her reflection in the huge mirror that you typically find covering one entire wall in a ballet studio. She also watched herself jump and strike poses and move around flamboyantly. She knew she was in a dance class all right. 

As I suspected would happen, the class soon caught her interest. She saw what the other little dancers were doing, and it looked like fun. So she went and joined in, most of the time. Naturally, she struggled sometimes to know where she was supposed to be. She was clearly not processing the instructions as quickly as most of the others. But I mean, these kids were three-and-four-year-olds. They weren’t even expected to always be in line at this early stage. I thought she did great. By the end of the class, she was already holding hands with Miss Anna. 

I am so proud of her! I think once she gets used to the routine of the class, and knows what to expect, I might eventually be able to leave the room. She might get to the point where she neither notices nor cares whether I’m there or not; she might realize that none of the other moms are staying in the room and not want me there anymore. She went to her second class last night and she’s already stopped checking in with me during the lesson. The only time she was worried about my staying near was when the class all held hands in one long line and left the room for a little tippy-toe tour of the community centre hallways. But when class was over, she didn’t want to leave. 

Well, we knew she’d like it. 

Lance takes martial arts at the same community centre. I don’t think he enjoyed his first class as much as Leah enjoyed hers, but he may come around. He loves Kung Fu Panda, after all. We keep telling him he’ll “be like Po” if he sticks with the class. But I suspect he’d rather have driving lessons so he can drive a Dodge and have his own Dodge key fob. Poor kid. He’s still more than nine years away from that. 

As for Clark, he’s always liked horseback riding. Unfortunately, thanks to a screw-up on the part of the postal service, his registration form didn’t get to the stable on time and all the fall classes were full by the time it arrived. But of the three kids, Clark is the biggest animal-lover. He loves riding horses, and we’re hoping to sign him up for the winter session.

Well, I guess that’s it.