Love Notes

Monthly-ish love notes from Dancing Mother to our beautiful circle of dancing mamas
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August/september 2026 love note

An abundant faith in my fertility dreams

By Mother Mother Binahkaye Joy

I love dancing with my children, even if they are not dancing with me. Oftentimes they are running, climbing, screaming, whining, questioning, nursing, playing, negotiating for more snacks, or doing whatever else they are doing attached to or near to my body. The fluid nature of our togetherness is my constant experiment; it’s why we have a family learning lab called Wildseed. My days as a dancing mother are guided by our intermittent movement evolutions, fluctuating frequencies and whirling intensities.

In life, the dance keeps teaching me, nothing ever stays the same. With this shudder and glide, that twist and arc, I am listening and feeling. I am observing how our collective proximity informs and reshapes the movements my body can experience. To dance with my children is to be perpetually unmoored from one possibility to the next. 

My body remembers dancing as an invisible mother in a solo-bodied reality, when my children were only known to me as the bright dreams I tucked deep inside my heart. I carried them with me everywhere I went, and always when I was dancing. When there was nowhere to dance, I put my dreams down on paper, writing and drawing and painting the stories of my future motherself. I surreptitiously dropped hints of my yearned-for babies in the margins of board meeting notes, on the flipside of scripts for the next performance, on the blank pages at the back of the Bible as I sat in Sunday service, taking in just enough of the sermon to get a spark of inspiration for new choreography, a play, or a story. 

I developed a system of symbols and code words, patterns and spirals, that correlated to elemental energies for each starseed, a future baby or creation, that I sensed within me. Everything I scribbled and marked on, the colors I wore, the earrings that dangled and the bracelets that clattered, the affirmations folded into the pockets of jeans and handbags–everything became a talisman for my fertility dreams. 

Then there were those illuminating and frightful times when my dreams had to actually save my life, the weight of their cumulative joys pushing mightily against any tyrants trying to swallow me whole. Visions of my yet-born children would call me back to source, and away from a person, place or thing hardening or closing me off to the miracles that could be born from my body. 

Inevitably such a moment unfolded inside the thick, voidal darkness consuming the world in the hours following midnight. A cascade of regrets crowding every exhale, the real reckoning was in facing how recklessly, yet again, I had entrusted my mothering dreams to his slick hands, hands that could not hold the sanctity of my fertility garden or the family I wanted to seed there. Lying still in the aftermath, with no buses running ‘til morning (back when there were no apps to call for a car, when there were no apps at all), I had little else to do but to acknowledge the mess I was making. For those inescapable hours, I would wrestle with whatever chain of events had led me right back to where I knew I never belonged, desperately needing to convince myself that next time I would not run so fast so eagerly, into a collision masquerading as love.

Whenever I could be in the bright sunshine, I laid my secret mother-heart prayers tenderly at the altar of creation, the altar I activated wherever I danced. I would go to a beautiful place, if I could, and if I could not I would close my eyes and imagine myself in a more desirable scene. (This is also how I have danced my family into every place we’ve ever lived.) And in that sweet and lovely place, tangible or intangible, I would dance as the mother I longed to be.

My movements would expand like the belly I wished would grow beyond the first 3 moons of emergent life. I would offer everything I had to the altar, mapping hope with flesh and bone and blood in the broad sweeps of my arms, with the luxurious undulations of my hips, inside the deep squats that stretched my thigh muscles and prepared my pelvic floor for some day’s birthing labors.

In the dance, everything was already real. I didn’t have to beg the divine to hear me; I was already seen as Mother, living as Mother. And in the sweet relief of arrival, the movements flowed more freely. My body could know a softness, and a lightness not otherwise accessible when I was gripped with anxiety and doubt, shame and grief—all things I grew to know well after so many of my starseeds transitioned too early to live into their human stories.

The dances I performed on the rooftop of my happy place (once upon a time when the people’s art institution belonged to the people), as the sun set over the Potomac River, embodied an abundant faith in my fertility dreams. In that movement space my motherself was wholly possible. I could feel the presence of my future children, their radiant spirits beaming strong from within, the echoes of their laughter rippling across parallels of time, reminding me that I had permission to call myself Mother now, even if no one else did.

In those moments of dream-mother dancing, I did not once consider how the physical truth of the long-prayed for children would transform my movements. I was not curious about my center of gravity tilting and reorienting every time I held a baby to the breast, or strapped a toddler on my back. No thoughts entered my mind about how crying babies, urgent bathroom situations, and incessant demands for food would abbreviate my juicy dance practices. Instead of the extended sessions I had as a pre-visible mother under majestic tree canopies and atop skyline-view terraces, I would learn to meet my dancing self in the precious little pockets of possibility that mothering allowed. 

I realized I could dance at the stovetop when the oil was heating in the pan, or on the side of the road while tired, cranky munchkins counted down the minutes to the next bus, or in the pitch black night, my bare feet skating over strewn toys as I swayed and rocked a baby back to sleep. I figured out how to stretch, bend, and fracture time, making the most of any crumb of time. Five minutes is also an eternity if you know how to use it right. I’m also still learning to give myself grace on days when the movement I reach for is not the one I achieve. Sometimes I have space, time, and a munchkin-free interlude, but some other part of life spills over into my dance intentions, or I’m too exhausted to lift my body up for one more thing. It feels like it comes and goes, the dance. But then I remember my root scripture, the breath is the first dance, and that I’m always a part of the dance in some variation or another, as long as I’m breathing.

Being a dancing mother has meant asking more questions of what a dance could be, of where it could exist, of how my body could grow into its new forms. It’s a daily labor, a continuous journey. I dance with my children because that is how I made a way for them to be here. Before they were earthside, I communed with them in the dance because for so long, that was all I had, that was where I could take up space and be a mother. 

So naturally, I have immense gratitude for the dance and its power to nurture fertility dreams. It feels essential to sustain a practice of dancing with my children as they grow into their own understandings of life and its possibilities. These movements are our lifelines, and we are committed to staying alive in our joy, in our creating, in our being.

love note photo story

These screen stills are from my 10th preistessaversary celebration dance, dancing with my daughter Jubilee, my first baby born during my initiation season. Her spirit came to me at the start of my fertility priestess initiation, and she was born almost exactly a year later. Dancing with her to celebrate 10 years on this path was a beautiful moment. Learn more about this dance in the performance archive at the Dancing Mother Library.

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