Degas and his dancing girls

They tortured me when I was a young girl. Degas and his dancing girls. Those tutus. The toile. The tulle. The toil. So beautiful. My mother painted them over and over again. Copying Degas but never quite achieving Degas. Never quite getting there. Stopped in her tracks. Held still by her longing. While her heavy limbed daughter tried to get some attention. Competing with the swirling girls dressed in white or blue, blurring the landscape with their grace. I could see that they had something that I wanted. But I did not know how to proceed. Did not know there was a process for each step, each leap, each twirl. They were only images on a canvas but they had something I did not have. They could perform. They could hear the music and come to life. Between the painter and the painted, an understanding. She never got there, although she never stopped trying.  Like me, she wanted to be a dancing girl. She thought she could get there by copying others. By plying the brushstrokes over and over on newer and newer canvases. In the end, all those dancing girls looked like her, Degas had disappeared.  The images still haunt me and I wonder why I still cannot leap.