what was i made for, ii

meet me on the dance floor

Apr 30, 2025

Hannah made us all dance for her 40th birthday.

Hannah has always been good at this, getting her way. She's a teacher, knows how to maneuver people. She is also at home in her body in a way I've rarely known a woman to be, full-footed, moves with a freedom and certainty that is inexpressibly beautiful to watch. And she’s a great friend, one of the best, really, so when she told us all to dance, we danced.

I danced, even though I can't. An ex once wrote me into a play and when the woman (me) abandons the man (him), his family tosses off their most withering criticism to assuage his pain: “She can’t even dance.” I imagine people would generously describe me as "cerebral" when what they mean is "awkward to the point of discomfort." But I love to dance! Like most bookish, pale, timid girls, I would have given anything to be the opposite: feral, long-limbed, tanned. I used to climb trees, scrape my knees on the descent. It always surprised people, seeing me up in the branches. I like when people take control of my body, at least on a dance floor. A friend once twirled me with such sureness and ferocity that the strap of my vintage dress snapped and I marveled over it the next day, that my body had done something so unplanned, so spontaneous, so of its own accord.

Pregnancy transmutes the body. You become shell, carapace. Have to hold yourself cautiously. Then comes birth and it is all animal, pre-consciousness. Having a newborn is a state of call-and-response and your body is often the only answer. So much of early motherhood has, for me, been a lesson in how deeply I can abstract myself, take myself apart to figure out which pieces can best serve the needs of my children. Because they need. They need and need and need, and yes, fulfilling that need is life-affirming, yes, but also I am kinda tired?

When Hannah told me to dance what she was really doing was issuing an invitation to use my body differently from how I’ve been using it for the last six years. I don’t need anything from you, she said. Just be here, on the dance floor, with me. Just hold my hand in your hand. Just touch my body with your body. Just watch me. Just move.

Maybe I write so much about the body because I’m rediscovering what it is to have one. Maybe I’ve never entirely known. Maybe I’m afraid of losing it just at the moment I’ve come to realize how good it actually is.

I’ve been trying to write about Babygirl (showing up to the discourse a good six months late, as usual!). I prowled my house after watching it, restless, dissatisfied. So much of it I didn’t like, didn’t like the idea that a woman that age couldn't own her desire, had to have it handed to her by someone else. Didn’t like that she couldn’t be a woman who knows — knows what she wants, knows how to get it. I watched and re-watched the best scene, the one where she takes control, little Harris Dickinson dancing for her, and for himself, to be looked at, to be desired. And I felt frantic, like I needed to do something fierce, something unapologetic—cut my hair, get a new tattoo, buy a sheer shirt, take up rock climbing—something something something with this one precious body before it is lost to me forever.

And then I cleaned the kitchen, soothed the baby back to sleep, packed the lunches, went to bed at a reasonable hour.

In the house we are one thing, Priyanka Mattoo writes, and only out of the house are we permitted to be another: “For now, my trips away allow me…to clarify and define who I am outside of my utility to my loved ones…I feel interesting and fun, my blood fizzy. I love how girlish and light I am able to be when I’m not preoccupied with thoughts like whether our laundry detergent contains endocrine disrupters.”

“Tell a Mom She's Hot Today,” Mattoo implored. Yes. Look at a mom! Look at a mom the way Post Malone looked at Beyoncé at the Super Bowl! Beyoncé, a mom. Me and Bey, exactly the same! Let my body be the inciting incident. Let it kindle something, before it breaks down.

At Hannah’s dance party, I stood in a corner with her and a guy I’d known vaguely in college. They were discussing another friend of Hannah’s, a woman, a mom, dark, curly hair and great eyebrows. The guy was jokingly chastising Hannah for not telling him how attractive this woman was, how he might have taken her up on her offer to set them up all those years ago had he known. I know this guy, know him to be kind and respectful and also happily married, so there was a specific, safe thrill in hearing him talk about a woman this way, a woman in her 40s who was, society would say, no longer meant to elicit the kind of brazen, outspoken desire this guy was (again, respectfully) expressing. I listened quietly, hungrily.

Later, he and I were catching up before he made the long drive back to his beloved wife and kids, and because I'd had two drinks, I told him how good it felt. "We're not seen in that way, you know? We're not meant to be wanted like that. We’ve lost it." And he looked at me in a way that can only be described as—what, respectfully lascivious?—and said, "Oh, Meghan, you haven’t lost it. You have definitely, definitely still got it."

I’ll wear the sheer shirt, I think. I’ll take dance classes. I’ll learn how to tie a cherry stem with my tongue. Does that sound desperate? Fuck it, I’ll be desperate. I live in the spectre of one of my mother’s most cruel insults, how a woman trying too hard is “mutton dressed as lamb.” That’s how desire feels to me these days: like I’m trying to climb inside the skin of my younger, pre-mothering self. How strange, to invite the male gaze when for so long I’ve been trying to exist in the world in spite of it.

But it’s not about men, not really (nothing really is!). It’s not about contorting yourself to fit whatever someone else deems worthy. It’s about moving into that reckless space in which desire lives, the space between you and what you want so charged with need, the not-having nearly always greater than having itself. It's what I feel when writing, sometimes, when the words move too quickly for me to capture them, and I am just chasing them to their conclusion, gasping and hungry. It’s my body all mine, desperate, loose-limbed, just-shaken. All launch and no comedown, a cinder, a flame. All the mothers on a dance floor. All of us, dancing.