“My children have made me a better educator”
Elizabeth McPherson
Interviewed on November 30th, 2022
by Anabella Lenzu
Anabella: Thank you so much Elizabeth for talking to me about your experience being a mother, an artist, and an educator. What does it mean, for you, to be a mother? I know you have two daughters, right?
Elizabeth: I have two daughters ages 18 and 23. I love being a mom. I absolutely love it. Once I had my first child, being a mom – caring for my kids and watching over them – became central. I love getting to know them as they grow and change. They're wonderful people, and they're two of my very best friends, and I love that too. It's wonderful to witness a young person developing into an adult, which both of my kids are now. They're both artists, which is very cool too.
Anabella: How do you transfer your love for the art to them? Tell me about your family.
Elizabeth: My husband is a visual artist. He's an art director at the Wall Street Journal, but he also has had his own visual arts continual practice since I've known him. He worked as a professional illustrator for a long time and now he does more fine art. Anyway, I won't go into him so much right now. We exposed our kids to a lot of art as they grew up. We took them to performances and museums. We did MoMA's workshops for kids, where they get to see an exhibit and have hands-on experiences with the exhibit. Once they were in middle school, they both were expressing specific interests — Delia in art and Cora in drama — so we found summer programs for them that supported their interests. They took piano, they danced with Ellen Robbins, and they both had theater classes. Cora took classes with Wingspan and Delia worked with the 52nd Street Project. When they started high school, they both ended up at LaGuardia — Cora for drama and Delia for art. Delia majored in art in college and Cora is majoring in drama, so their interests became pretty clear early on, and there wasn't ever any wavering from that for Delia. Cora would move away from theatre at times, but she kept coming back to it and is happy where she is right now. We have an artistic family and we live in Manhattan Plaza, which is a building with a lot of performing artists, so through their parents, friend's parents, and other people in the building, they saw examples of people making careers in the arts.
Anabella: How would you define what is to be a “good mother”?
Elizabeth: First and foremost, being a good mother is about caring and patience; trying to help them find their way. I was trying not to push them into what I wanted them to become, but trying to help them identify what they were interested in and foster that interest. Delia was very interested in art, so we went to Italy and saw many museums in Italy; we went to Paris, to the Louvre. Cora and I have seen umpteen Broadway shows. I was just trying to encourage them and support their interests. Instead of wanting them to be something that they're not, I focused on helping them figure out what they want to be and supporting them in that. Being a good mother also meant just being there, like having dinner at night and talking at dinner, sitting together on a beach or in a forest, and taking walks through the pandemic. We took so many walks together, particularly Delia and I, my older daughter. Cora took a lot of walks on her own, but Delia and I took walks together just to reflect, be together in silence, and find comfort in companionship. Those are some of the major things: concern, patience, and care for them as individuals.
New York City public schools, oh my goodness, we won't go into detail about that, but both my kids went through public schools from Kindergarten through 12th grade. Navigating that system is quite elaborate. I know I come from a place of privilege already knowing what schools would work best for my kids, but finding the time to go on all the tours and to do the research was strenuous.
Anabella: How did you maintain a professional life and construct a family?
Elizabeth: It's hard. I joke about it, but it's actually true that I wrote my doctoral dissertation with one hand because I had a baby in the other arm. I literally typed with one hand. I don't have very good typing skills, in terms of traditional typing, but I'm pretty fast with one hand! I would also find moments like when they were napping. One of my colleagues was asking me about this because, in addition to my teaching, I have done a lot of writing and research. My colleague asked me if I dedicate two hours a day to writing and I said, “No, I write whenever there's a moment.” I wrote one dance book review when I was sitting at the vet's office waiting for Luna the cat to be x-rayed after she swallowed a stone or something. That's my life; it's about finding the moments whenever they come up.
My husband has been very supportive too. There were times when he would take the girls out with him on the weekend to go to the MoMA or something like that so that I could work on some writing project in quiet because that's a need for me. When I'm writing, I like to be able to read something from beginning to end without being interrupted and every time I get interrupted, I have to go back to the beginning. As my kids got older, they understood and would give me that space, but when they were younger, that was harder. It helped when my husband could take them out of the apartment somewhere for a little bit, and I could have space.
I've also had jobs that have been pretty flexible too. I worked as a K through 12 educator at Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private school on the Upper East Side when Delia was little, but when Cora was born, I left that position and took a part-time job at Fieldston Lower and taught in a few different places as an adjunct. Eventually, I got a tenure-track, full-time position here at Montclair State. The K through 12 teaching was less flexible because you have to be there from eight to three, but I had holidays off, summer break, and spring break, so I was able to figure that out. Both daughters went to a cooperative preschool, but I was able to figure out the co-op part by using my days off and my breaks. Joel helped, and my parents used to come up and help too. Once I started working at the university, there was some flexibility. I had to be there to teach, but if I needed to leave at two on a Monday afternoon to go take somebody to the dentist, that was fine. A lot of the admin work could be done at home as needed and grading could be done at home in the evening. The university job provided some flexibility. When I first started and for years after, I taught 8:30 AM ballet class on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I was up and out early before the kids were going to school. My husband, Joel, got them ready for school on those days. At that time he was working from 11-7 PM, so he was there in the morning, which helped because I had to be out early in the morning. Then I was there in the evenings for dinner, homework, and all of the after-school activities, but I loved taking them to their after-school activities.
Anabella: I completely understand, but sometimes I feel guilty about what I can do and what I can't do. Can I have a full-time job? Well, how do you decide to be with your kids or not? Motherhood is full of sacrifices.
Elizabeth: I worked part-time from when my second child was born until she was four. Before that, I was working full-time at Convent of the Sacred Heart when Delia was little. One year I was working four days a week, but then I went to five days a week and it was considered a full-time job although it was not 40 hours a week. When Cora was born, I didn't work full-time again until she was four. That helped me manage the time period when a lot was going on family-wise.
Anabella: How did motherhood shape your career?
Elizabeth: I stopped performing, for the most part, before my first daughter was born. It was a conscious decision because I was having some knee issues. In fact, I fell once in performance and I fell once in rehearsal. My knee just gave out. I was seeing a doctor, but there wasn't any particular surgery that was going to help me at that point. I could have had the cartilage scraped, but sometimes it helped, and sometimes it didn't. My doctor advised that I shouldn't do it unless I was planning on going full force ahead with my professional dance career. At that point, I felt like I was winding down, so I left the dance companies that I had been working with and focused on Delia and teaching.
If you look at my resume, if you look carefully, you'll see there are some slower periods. When each child was born, there was a dip in how much I was doing. You definitely can see that, but I've been in places that support that. My colleagues in the theater and dance faculty have children of varying different ages. I've never felt like it was a hindrance in any way. When I interviewed for Fieldston Lower, where I taught part-time in the lower school for four years,I didn’t tell them that I had a baby beforehand. Cora was an infant and I went to the interview with Joel. My whole family drove up there and I nursed Cora before I went in. Then I handed her off to Joel and ran in for the interview, then came back to nurse her in the car, because she was really little. Cora was born in May and maybe three or four weeks later, I was interviewing for this job. It was very soon. I wasn't going to tell them that I was a mother because somebody told me in my Ph.D. program not to tell people that you were a mother because it could deter them from hiring you. So I hadn't said anything, but then I said something during the interview and somebody said, “Oh, so you're a mom?” I said, “I am.” Then they asked, “Why didn't you tell us? We love hiring moms!” I would be teaching in an elementary school and they felt like moms had a particular sensibility, especially with younger children, so it was kind of interesting because I hadn't told them on purpose and then I said something that made them realize I was a mother. They were glad to hear it. I think that it can help you relate to younger children. I was always good with young children. My specialty was teaching four and five-year-olds. I have a lot of patience and I actually love the unpredictability of them. It's exciting for me to teach that age because they're so creative in everything, but being a mom helped me relate to children of different ages.
Anabella: That's a great example. Sometimes I'm in circles where no one has kids and I'm the only one that has kids. Do you think your life has been built around being a mother or vice versa?
Elizabeth: I always wanted to have children. When my husband and I got married –we married in 1993– we knew we didn't want to have children right away. Delia was born in 1999. I knew I didn't want to give up my career to have a child and we needed the income. We needed a two-person income to make this happen –– working and living in New York. They're just intertwined. I am glad that I've had a career. My daughters and I talk about it. I have my own identity, so I'm not just focused on them. Since I wasn’t hovering over them, they had a fair amount of independence and have thrived on that.
Anabella: Talking about female lineage: Can we talk about your mother, yourself, and your daughters and the feminine knowledge that you want to pass?
Elizabeth: Interesting. My mom didn't work outside of the home until I was in middle school. She was a piano teacher and she did a lot of volunteer work when I was little. Then she started working full-time when I was in middle school, so I saw her build a career. She basically joined a business that raises money for nonprofit organizations and within a few years, she had taken over that business. She's 85 years old, and she is still running the business.
She talks about retirement, but she is quite the model for being industrious and is still finding fulfillment for herself as a working woman. That's very important to her. She loves her job and her work, so I learned from her how to be a very strong mom and a strong woman. She is also a very caring mom; she nurtured my artistic interest. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, but we had a lot of touring companies visit, so I saw Marcel Marceau, Ohio Ballet, Ballet West, and Joffrey Ballet. For every company that came through, my mom bought tickets. There were so many nights when I was doing homework during intermission. I took piano lessons, dance, and theater classes, and my mom nurtured all of that. We even went to Memphis to see the Metropolitan Opera, so I was nurtured as an artist. I'm sure that affected what I wanted to give to my children.
Anabella: What else have you passed along from your mother to your daughters?
Elizabeth: Discipline, assertiveness, and tenacity: I didn't grow up in a household where the men talked and the women were quiet. The women in my family are loud with very strong voices, and that's true for my grandmother's generation as well. I was very close to my mother's parents and my grandmother was a real voice –– as were her sisters. She had several sisters and they were loud and had careers. The idea of women having a career has been passed down for generations in my family. My grandmother grew up in rural Tennessee but went to college during the Depression and was the first person in her family to get a four-year college degree. That was unusual for a woman particularly. I mean, it was unusual for her town, for anybody, man or woman, but it was particularly unusual for a woman. The importance of education has certainly always been instilled.
The idea of maternity and what's female, or male, a lot of those boundaries are blurring right now and certainly, my daughters are feeling that blur and thinking about how they present and how they want to present. Are you wearing pants, dressing more masculine, or dressing more feminine? Do you wear bows in your hair? Do you not? Do you wear earrings? Their generation thinks a lot about how they dress and why, and how that aligns with their identity..
Anabella: How do you balance your responsibilities as an educator, teacher, and mother? How do you take care of yourself?
Elizabeth: I'm not a person who needs a whole lot of personal space and being with my children was grounding, so that, itself, was a centering activity. I'm now an empty nester, so I have all this space. My husband works three long days a week (1pm-1am). He's only going in to work one or two days a week and he works at home the other nights. When he's not there, I go home and I have hours of space in the apartment when it's just me and the cats and it's quite different and interesting. I am enjoying it. I'm enjoying having some quiet and space and not having to worry about somebody else needing something or both of us needing the kitchen sink at the same time. Not having to navigate space with other people is quite interesting. As a family, we've always been in pretty small spaces. We do have a two-bedroom apartment with two bathrooms, which helps, but it’s not a big house. My husband needed more quiet space, but he ended up having that because of his work hours, so he’s always had a couple of hours in the morning when there weren't other people around.
We were all together during the pandemic too, and I did enjoy that companionship. We were in a little house in upstate New York, northwest of the city. It's the same size as our apartment, but there's only one bathroom and there are not a lot of doors. It’s kind of an open place, so finding spaces for people to be on Zoom and do their individual things was a little difficult, but it was wonderful being together. I did recognize that it would probably be the last time that we would be together, all four of us, like that for an extended period, so there were wonderful parts of it, even through the horror of the pandemic. It was a chance for us all to live as a foursome again because my older daughter had already moved out by then, but she came back because of the pandemic.
Anabella: What are some of the things that dance gave you?
Elizabeth: I think dance gave me grit and tenacity. Dance careers are hard and you have to be pretty gritty to make them work unless you're just extraordinarily lucky. I think I've passed that on to my kids and I'm glad of that. I see them dealing with adversity well. When something happens that wasn't what they were hoping for, they're able to take that, move along, and look to the next thing. I'm really proud of that and I think that's something I got through dance. There is that idea of structure and order. But I don't know. My two children are different in that way. Cora likes structure and order more than Delia does. Delia is more free-flowing and ideas are, are shifting and moving. And Cora is sort of more, matter of fact a little bit in terms of how she organizes ideas and plans, and so they're different in that way.
What else with dance? I mean, I loved that they danced with Ellen Robbins. I loved that whole process of exploring their creative voices through dance, which is what Ellen nurtures so beautifully and that was fun to watch them do that. Delia took ballet just a little bit with me, but Cora never really wanted to do ballet. And Delia wasn't huge on ballet. They liked more modern dance, and Delia particularly loved improvisation. I would say dance has just been a passion of mine for forever. I love teaching too –– dance and teaching. I love history, and I love writing. I'm doing things that I truly love and that’s an example for them too: To figure out what you really love to do and then try to make that work as a life.
Anabella: How do you see yourself through the eyes of your kids?
Elizabeth: I see myself as a strong leader and as somebody who listens. I have strong passions and strong ideas. I am positive, I enjoy life, and I enjoy my job. I’m the type of person who's busy and likes being busy, and I fill my life with meaningful things because I like staying busy. I enjoy nature and can also sit and find a lot of peace just being quiet in nature. My leadership style is –– I collect opinions. For example, I'm working on a curriculum adjustment and I'm talking about it with our secretary, who is an alum of our program, and other faculty members to get feedback from them. I ask them, “What do you think about this? What if I did this instead?” Their feedback is helping me shape the curriculum, so I don't tend to go in assuming I know how to do this, and I'm going to do it this way. I tend to collect opinions and ideas from other people and then mold those into whatever I'm working on. That’s the kind of leadership style I have; collaborative, I guess you would call it.
Anabella: Do you find parallels between you being an educator and a mother?
Elizabeth: I think I have a nurturing quality. I do try to set some boundaries with the students, partly because we have 123 undergraduates and another nine MFA students, so I need to set some boundaries with them or else I get too fragmented. I like this position, but I have to protect myself a little bit, time-wise. I need to make space for my own self-care. I do want to nurture the students and be there for them. They know if they need me, they can come find me, and they do. I am not always available, but they can make an appointment too. We also have a system. When the student has an issue, if it's an issue about a teacher, I advise them to go to that teacher first. If it's something else, then go to your assigned advisor, and if their advisor can't solve it, then you come to me. I created this system so that everybody is not coming to me for everything because I can't do that for over 130 people.
Anabella: Motherhood is also about setting limits. What boundaries did you set for yourself and your family?
Elizabeth: We laugh about it because I don't think we set many limits for our kids. I mean, it just worked, but I do remember when a new babysitter came in and she asked, “Okay, so what are your rules?” Joel and I looked at each other and I said, “I don't know, like don't pull the cat's tail?” What are our rules? We didn't have a lot of rules. I guess we tried to be positive about things rather than telling them, “You can't do this” and “You can't do that.” We didn't have a lot of “You can't do this,” except, literally, don't hurt the cats. I don't know that I was the best person in terms of setting those kinds of limits.
I do have to set limits on my time as an educator and how much people draw from my energy. I have learned a few things about setting boundaries. I don't like emails to build up so I usually respond quickly, but now I'll sometimes send them the next day or two days later, so I don’t give students and faculty the impression that if they email me at midnight, then I'm going to respond right away, unless it needs an immediate response. So I have emails scheduled to send later to protect me and my time. I can't answer emails 24/7, and there are other systems in place at the university to deal with major crises that happen in the middle of the night. That’s not my role here. They need to call campus security.
Anabella: Exactly. Is there anything else that you’d want to add?
Elizabeth: My children have made me a better educator because they are part of a different generation. I have often run things by them. For example, I would ask them, “Can I just read through this email to you and make sure that it gives the impression that I'm trying to give? I sometimes need students to know that I hear them, even if I can't do the thing that they're asking me to do. My daughters have also taught me to be more patient.
Anabella: Thank you so much, for sharing your story. You are an inspiration.
Elizabeth: Thank you so much for this opportunity!
Elizabeth McPherson is a tenured Professor, Director of the Dance Division, MFA Dance coordinator, and Deputy Chair of Theatre and Dance at Montclair State University. She received her BFA from Juilliard, followed by an MA from The City College of New York, and a PhD from New York University. She is the author of The Contributions of Martha Hill to American Dance and Dance Education, 1900-1995, co-author of Broadway, Balanchine and Beyond: A Memoir, and editor of The Bennington School of the Dance: A History in Writings and Interviews. Her newest book Milestones in Dance in the USA, an edited collection, was published by Routledge in September 2022. Executive Editor of the journal Dance Education in Practice, she has also written articles and reviews for Ballet Review, Dance Teacher Magazine, Attitude: The Dancers’ Magazine and The Journal of Dance Education. She has worked as an educational consultant for the National Dance Education Organization, The New York City Department of Education, and the New Jersey Department of Education.
Dr. McPherson has staged numerous 20th century dance works from Labanotation and other sources. Projects include Antony Tudor’s Continuo and Anna Sokolow’s Rooms. She is a board member of the Martha Hill Dance Fund (since 2005) and the National Dance Education Organization (since 2014). Performance credits include: Ernesta Corvino’s Dance Circle Company, Avodah Dance Ensemble, and the Louis Johnson Dance Theatre.
Originally from Argentina, Anabella Lenzu is a dancer, choreographer, scholar & educator with over 30 years of experience working in Argentina, Chile, Italy, and the USA. Lenzu directs her own company, Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama (ALDD), which since 2006 has presented 400 performances, created 15 choreographic works, and performed at 100 venues, presenting thought-provoking and historically conscious dance-theater in NYC. As a choreographer, she has been commissioned all over the world for opera, TV programs, theatre productions, and by many dance companies. She has produced and directed several award-winning short dance films and screened her work in over 200 festivals both nationally and internationally.