There can be brutal power in such clinical femininity. I’m vain enough to admit that I’ve always appreciated ballet for its aesthetics, the flitty silk skirts, the crepe-pink ribbons. This was in the latter half of 2022, at the crest of fashion’s “balletcore” wave that is best embodied by graceful, hyper-girlish styles like square-toe flats and soft wrap-tops.

The omniscient algorithm fueling my TikTok’s “For You” page had already decided I needed to watch a video of an adult person taking up ballet every seven minutes. Still, my physician shared, a fair amount of anecdotal evidence abounds as to how to navigate this strange new chapter. The term was coined in the 1970s by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael, but has not been heavily studied in the wider medical community in the decades since. It was here, at my single post-delivery follow-up, that my obstetrician told me about a phenomenon called “matresence,” or the physical, psychological, and emotional transition that can occur when one becomes a mother. It happens, my mom told me about six months into parenthood. My right hip makes a bizarre noise now my feet are a handful of centimeters wider even my teeth are in different places than they once were. Never mind the vague softness that crept outward from my now-vacant belly: Growing and delivering and ultimately feeding a child transformed the most minute physiological details. Through moves uptown and downtown, to Manhattan and now, most recently, back to the Midwest again, my threadbare Capezio bag never left the back of my closet.īy the time I became a mother, I came to live out the adage that two things can be true: I had never felt more at peace with myself, yet never had my physical form felt so estranged. After all, ballet was my old, stoic friend, and she was always there when needed to sink back into a rigid pool of nostalgia at whichever crossroads I found myself.

Square toe ballet flats