Crazy Dance Mom

I vowed I would never be one. I used to make fun of them at recitals.  And today I realized, much to my chagrin, that I have become one. I AM a crazy dance mom. Now to be fair, I think 90% of it is just being a mom being driven crazy by my tween. BUT since we happen to be at events involving dance a lot these days, I think I can officially be classified as a "crazy dance mom". I am pleased to announce, however, that every other mom at today's competition could easily fall into this category as well. Moms trying to get their daughters' make-up perfect, daughters arguing that it looks good enough.  Moms sticking in just one more hairpin, God forbid a stray hair comes loose, daughters grabbing at their heads screaming out in agony. Yes, these are the things we do.  We don't try to annoy our children, well at least not ALL of the time, but we do.

At today's event, the competition was offering a "special". Though not nearly as "special" as it would have been coming home with more money in my wallet, but I digress. All of the girls on the dance team, were getting the "special", which included a program, A PEN , a t-shirt printed with the competition name and all of the dancers' names, and a pair of embellished black sweat pants. I wish we moms could somehow form a pact, vowing to not buy the extras at the competition. Instead we all cave, because we don't want our dancer to be the odd one out. Well, the sweatpants included in the "special" came in Child Large and Adult Small.  Skipping entirely over the very crucial Child XL size.  You learn to buy big, but not too big, at these events so that you can get the most wear out of the purchased item, and hopefully bypass the "specials" offered next year. After wavering, I decided on the Child Large.  However, I wanted my little dancer to try them on before we left the competition, because if they fit perfectly, then I wanted to exchange them for the larger size. We had time to kill before her first performance, so I asked her to try on the sweats.  I did not consider this an unreasonable request, though I received quite a lot of grousing and complaining about it from my dancer. I informed her that I could just return them altogether then if this was too much of a hardship. Finally, with this threat on the table, she tried them on, and they were sufficiently large. I did not need to exchange them. We slid the sweats back off and I grabbed her costume skirt to hand to her, and noticed IN HORROR, that her pink tights were now covered entirely with black fuzz.  It looked like she had some unsightly growth of black hair pushing through the tights. Nice.  I frantically began picking it off, because no one had tape with them, and I couldn't find anyone with a lint roller either. Two new "must haves" for the dance bag have now made my list.  Our window of "plenty of time" before her dance was now shrinking. Have you ever tried to pick large quantities of black fuzz off of pink tights?  Enter crazy dance mom. Some of the older girls that did not have to dance took a leg, another mom and I took the other leg, and we picked and picked and picked.  Did I mention that there was grousing and complaining? Finally we had her de-fuzzed well enough for the performance, thank goodness, and I learned a valuable lesson today.  Wanting to save other moms the grief of what I endured I shared the experience with those that were not around to witness it.  I am glad to report that all of them said that they would not have thought about that either.  At first, I thought they were just trying to console me, but then one of moms that I told about the fiasco had her daughter try the sweats on with the tan tights! I wasn't there when she had her daughter first put them on, but I did arrive in time to see the frantic de-fuzzing process.  I said, "What were you thinking?  Did you not learn from my mistake?"  She answered, "But you said it was the pink tights! I didn't think it would stick to the tan tights too!"  This logic completely escaped me, but it did make me feel better.