Haiku 1

Raise a glass to jazz.

Triple-step, slap a knee, laugh

when you miss a beat.

In January and February of 2020, right before the first wave of COVID arrived in the States, I spent my Wednesday evenings at Nick's Nightclub—a generous misnomer for a dive bar with a wood floor worn smooth by countless couples dancing the Balboa, two-step, and foxtrot surrounded by booths covered in vinyl, smelling like a few decades worth of burgers and fries.

But there was a private room in the back with mirrored walls perfect for a group of beginners to learn the basics of Lindy Hop. I love to dance, so for my birthday Brandon gifted me with six weeks of swing dance lessons.

I'm not a complete beginner–I've been dancing the jitterbug with my grandma for as long as I can remember. Every time I visit, she puts some Frank Sinatra on the jukebox, and we dance. “More tension,” she’s forever telling me as she gives my arms a shake.

GG is of the generation that believes the institution of the social dance is one worth keeping. After all, that's where she met my grandpa--at one of her regular Friday nights at the Legion.

"He only danced with me," she says. "He couldn't dance, so I led him."

I can understand why my grandpa let himself be led. My grandma is a force.

But more than that, there’s a brightness to the Lindy Hop that makes the burdens we carry a little lighter. As you relax into the swing of the drum kit, the thrum of the upright bass moves through your chest, releasing the tension in your shoulders and expanding your lungs so you can breathe more deeply.

The first time I left the dance floor breathless but with a lightness in my chest, I needed a minute to name this paradox--this breathlessness that became expansive and somehow made it easier to breathe.

Joy. It was joy.

I had forgotten what that felt like. At the time, the responsibility of mothering our three small children weighed heavily on me. Up to that point, most of motherhood had felt like having to get it right. There'd been far more fear than joy--fear that I'll somehow mess my kids up, that I'll pass along my insecurities, traumas, and unhelpful ways of handling them, all the things that have tinged my own experience of living with depression and anxiety.

This approach to parenting is paralyzing. I know, intellectually, that I can't possibly get it right all the time, that failure in parenting is an absolute certainty. What I have a harder time believing is that the failures are redeemable. Theoretically, I know this to be true, but I've had little experience with it.

Then in slides swing dancing. Somehow, those nights on the dance floor gave me a much-needed embodied experience of the "fortuity of faults / the making and then redeeming of mistakes" (as Abigail Carroll puts it so beautifully in her poem "Creed"). Our lives are mostly improvisation, and we will step on each other's toes or occasionally elbow each other in the ribs, but like my dance partners, we can extend each other grace.

I've come to realize that so much of parenthood, or personhood really, is about practicing repentance and reconciliation--a mutual owning of mistakes and creating new, more life-giving patterns of being together.

So I wrote this haiku at the beginning of the pandemic as a way of inviting some of the looseness and lightness of swing dancing into our life as a family--a reminder that the nature of improvisation allows for missteps, honors the creative qualities of tension, affirms the goodness of collaboration, and facilitates the joy of laughing together.

And if you need a little swing in your life, you can listen to one of my favorite songs here.