Meet Mother Superior

As I mentioned before, I am convinced that there are ballet mom archetypes.  In my last posting, You Are So Lucky You Have a Boy. I mentioned the Boy Ballet Mom.  Today, I wanted to introduce Mother Superior.

You can identify Mother Superior in her environment by her smug attitude concerning her child.  It is a given (in her mind) that her child will be the star of the level.  Mother Superior believes that her darling should have the best roles, the bulk of the teacher's attention, and that the traditional rules concerning such things as pointe work and level placement simply do not apply for the child of Mother Superior.

Other talented children, who may be extended special privileges because they too are talented, are seen as threats to Mother Superior.  She will stop at nothing to ensure that her child is the most privileged one in the studio.  On the surface, this may not seem like a problem.   After all, she is only jeopardizing her own child's training with her unrelenting demands and expectations.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Because Mother Superior is so vocal (often in a passive aggressive way), she can jeopardize other children's opportunities.

Let me give you an example...in our studio, we have a rule of thumb that children are not put on pointe until the age 11.   However, we have a child who is age 10, she is strong, has regular attendance and looks like she is 16.  I suspect that if the teacher were able to make decisions on candidates for pointe work solely based on an individual basis, that she would make an exception to her rule that students be 11.  However, because Mother Superior has a tendency to stir up trouble when she senses a slight to her child this 10 year old will have to wait as Mother Superior's child is a tiny 10.

Another common symptom of "Mother Superioritis" is offering unsolicited assessments of your child's abilities.  Mother Superior will not hesitate to "lovingly" put down your child and suggest that they are perhaps not strong enough to have the same privileges that her child has.  If she does extend a compliment, it is generally in tandem with her child.   Seeing your child succeed has been known to cause a massive flare-up of this terrible condition for which there is no inoculation.

Some friends of mine encountered the wrath of Mother Superior when it came to their young daughter who was accelerated  beyond the normal levels.  Mother Superior had a daughter who was 17 and was preparing for what Mother Superior hoped would be a professional career.  Unfortunately, while very talented at an early age, Mother Superior's daughter had suffered the wrath of Mother Nature and a plague of hormonal changes.  After puberty, the young woman was plump and had lost a lot of the facility she had once possessed.

Mother Superior's daughter had grown up landing the plum roles and it was a foregone conclusion that she would be Sugar Plum Fairy in the upcoming production of The Nutcracker.  However, this exceptional 14 year old arrived and blew away the Artistic Director.  She was not only technically gifted but she was also aesthetically more pleasing.  Additionally, as a thin 14 year old, it was much easier for the Cavalier to partner her than the older heavier young lady.  So, roles went up and Mother Superior saw the casting.  She EXPLODED and began a course of destruction that may have rivaled Sherman's March to the Sea.

Nobody was safe from her wrath, they were either forced to listen incessantly about THE betrayal or she was aggressively sabotaging the younger girl by spreading rumors about her and her family.  It was horrible.  It was sad and did some damage to the young 14 year old who found it difficult to comprehend how people could be so cruel.  Unfortunately, for the 14 year old, it took a while for the other mothers to realize what was going on.  Initially, they believed the stories and lies this woman fabricated.  But, as it normally does, the truth won out.

The challenge with Mother Superior is, she is a competitive person.  She sees everything as a race and that there can be only one winner.  She does not understand that there is enough room in the dance world for all talent.  She prods and pushes her own child, she will not hesitate to challenge the teacher on her child's placement and she forgets her place with administration and other parents.  She perches herself and her child above others and asserts that her child is the standard.  Perhaps, the biggest problem, because her child is talented, she is involved; and she is generally likable--so, she can get in the head of the most secure of mothers and plant ideas that spur jealousy, hurt and resentment.  The other mothers will then see favoritism where there is none and believe that the studio shares Mother Superior's opinions about who does and does not have "it." The reality is...the studio knows that many students can have "it" and that "it" can take a while to emerge.  They do not tell students or parents that their child is the next Tiler Peck, Gillian Murphy or Maria Koetchekova, but this mother will claim that they did.  It makes it hard for teachers to sing the praises of Mother Superior's child, because she will inevitably expect something in addition, a bigger role, a new level placement, private lessons, you name it...they are entitled.

The Studio World can be a jungle.  There is all sorts of wildlife out there.  The trick is to learn how to identify the various species of Ballet Mom, know if they are poisonous or not and navigate safely through to your destination.  It is a tricky thing to do, but it can be done.  If you listen closely, you can identify the call of each archetype, "The Boy Ballet Mom", "Mother Superior", "Mama Bear", "Miss Clueless", "The Social Climber", "The Ballet Dad","The Pleaser", "The Penny Pincher", "The Super Volunteer" "Everybody's Best Friend" "Mrs. Not Good Enough",  "Miss Money Bags" and the "Is This Over Yet?"  The truth is for most of us, a little bit of each archetype exists in us.  The challenging part is keeping these personalities calm and in check so that we are able to be a voice of reason for our children and teach them how to keep perspective as they navigate this tough world.