Jenny Joseph, “Warning”

On liberated joy … and my mom

Last summer I took an 8-week beginners ballet course. For adults. Cheap ballet flats not included.

If you can be something less than a beginner, that was me. While the other participants (mostly women in their 30s) were returning to ballet after many years away, I was making my very first, and very awkward, entry into dance.

Photo by Haley Parson on Unsplash

My siblings would be delighted to share with you just how unskilled of a dancer I am. As teenagers, my sister told me, after I had uncharacteristically done some kind of playful twirl or twist in the kitchen as we were drying dishes, to please never do that again. Or at least not in public.

But there I was at the ballet studio, every Thursday night in June and July, trying my darndest to stay present and keep a good attitude.

I was there because of Jenny Joseph’s poem “Warning.”

A few weeks before, I had brought this poem to a gathering of faculty women as we began summer break. In light of the poem’s comedic display of spirited excess, I invited us to consider what we could “try on” this summer that would be playful or freeing, something that would help us practice curiosity and openness.

To this invitation, a friend announced she’d been thinking about taking ballet, and a few days later she texted and asked if I’d consider joining her. I was trapped by my own summons—and by Joseph’s poem. And so, I acquiesced.

At ballet class, most of my attention was focused on not making a fool of myself, but this is precisely what Joseph’s poem says we should do. More than that, the poem helps us reimagine such foolishness as wisdom, excess as beauty, indulgence as liberation.

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Take 60 seconds to read it here (because I’m trying to avoid any copyright conundrums)

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Joseph imagines old age as the time to do what one wishes even if it’s not considered practical, safe, accepted. Through a series of “I shall” statements, she vows to grow into an “old woman” unrestrained by frugality (“I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves / And satin sandals”) and unencumbered by propriety (“I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired / And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells”).

While she may have spent her life following the rules and “setting a good example for the children,” in old age Time will be too short for restraint and inhibition.

Rather than leaving us pining for future liberation, the final stanza proffers an invitation. Time is too short even today—so why not “practice a little now?”

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One person I know who does this well is my own mother. While she is, in many respects, a rule-follower, everyone she encounters—and I do mean practically everyone—recognizes a woman who pursues joy and embraces fun, even if it means coloring outside the lines a bit.

She wears 4-inch-long skeleton earrings on Halloween and a battery-operated light-up Christmas sweater all through December—and not just at parties.

Her favorite place is Costco, where she finds treats galore in excessive sizes and comes home excited to display her treasures.

One time, as we finished up at school, we found her positioned in the doorway wearing a gorilla mask outside the school office. This was high school, mind you, and I was mortified.

Six years ago, as part of our family staycation, she scheduled an appointment (!!!) and took us to a surprise location where we received the honor of contributing to the World’s Largest Paintball by rolling another layer of yellow paint on a 5-foot ball—made entirely of paint—hanging from the ceiling. This happened exactly where you’d expect: in a garage in rural Indiana. We then paid the paintball owners to take our picture.

She needs no excuse for a celebration but is thrilled to find one. Any reason whatsoever, really. With her patients at the nursing home or the kids in the classrooms where she subs, she arrives ready—with the right accoutrements and sometimes in thematic attire—to observe Lemon Day. Zoo Animal Day. Donut Day. Hard Taco Day.

A few years ago, she bought a golf cart. To be clear, my parents don’t live in a “golfcart community,” nor do they have access to paved roads or trails. But just as my mom imagined, the grandkids love to take golfcart rides around their one acre of yard across from a cornfield.

She makes all sorts of announcements and proclamations of activities she hopes to pursue. Visit a cranberry bog in Wisconsin. Take a Mississippi River Cruise. Watch all of Denzel Washington’s movies in a year. The only common link between these adventures is their newness and fun and the unmitigated delight they promise her.

If given the chance, she would take any kind of dance class she could find.

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I don’t mean to suggest that my mother is aimless, frivolous, foolish, surfacey. On the contrary, her love for adventure comes from depth and intentionality. She knows something particular about what it means to “be joyful always” (1 Thess. 5:16).

Hers is no solitary joy or private adventure. She aims, always, for her joy-quest to ripple—no, swell—beyond her. She has invested her life in increasing the joy of others. While her sometimes reluctant audiences don’t always appreciate joy thrust upon them, our lives would be far less rich and far more boring if it weren’t for her willingness to embrace, every day, any and every opportunity to bear witness to the light.

Her celebratory spirit is a practice of hope. And if we’re startled or embarrassed by this—“shocked and surprised,” in Joseph’s words—it may only be because we’re accustomed to hope and joy in weak measure. My mom refuses such frugality.

Yes, our lives would be more practical, more predictable, more sedentary without her celebratory nudges. But such a life, Joseph reminds us, is not necessarily the way of the wise. Sometimes, wisdom invites us to wear purple and takes us to cranberry bogs.

And calls us to dance.

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